Archive of Our Own

James Fitzjames has never been given to considering the merits of dying. Indeed, if pressed, he would have said he would take all reasonable precautions not to die, and specifically not to die half-blind, rotting from the inside out, and so reduced he had not even the wherewithal to swallow the poison he had to ask for.

Now, however, he is beginning to reconsider his initial position. Now he thinks that death has lost its sting, if ever it had one.

‘It’s only a grey hair,’ says Francis.

‘Only a grey hair,’ says Fitzjames. ‘Only a grey hair.’

‘I have some,’ says Francis. ‘I suppose I have many.’

Francis supposes he has many, Fitzjames explains, because he cannot tell for certain whether he has many or few. He cannot tell because his hair is light and therefore the occasional glint of silver is lost in all that fine spider-silk red-gold [1]. Fitzjames, however, has dark hair and therefore the merest first hideous creeping pupa of white shrieks its presence like a murderer awash in guilt and begging to be shriven [2].

And besides, in Francis the grey hair is a mark of all he has endured, all the contumely he has had to digest and that he brought back as love for his men, the trials he shepherded them through. In Francis every strand of silver is a mark of grace, every year a benediction.

Fitzjames, while largely innocent of any sense of self-preservation, has sufficient to not use this exact phrasing. Instead he says, ‘Grey hair looks well on you,’ and winces inwardly at the intentness with which he says the words.

Francis looks at him and then looks away. Fitzjames watches a pale pink suffuse his cheeks as he clears his throat. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘so it does on you.’ He turns his head to look at Fitzjames, schooling his countenance. ‘It adds distinction.’

This, Fitzjames thinks, would probably be more reassuring if his lips weren’t twitching as he said it.

Fitzjames rises and leaves. He is not in a pet, he tells himself. He merely has much to attend to on Enterprise and therefore cannot idle away the scant months they have until Disko Bay. He is not storming away. He has pressing matters to attend to, that is all, matters that cannot wait and must be attended to with celerity, which is why he is leaving in haste, though with the stateliness that befits that thrice-damned grey hair. Similarly, he is closing the door to the Great Cabin with some force in order to give Francis privacy, that is all.

‘James!’

Fitzjames turns, placing – not jamming, but placing – his hat on his head.

‘What is it, Francis?’

Francis draws abreast of him. His eyes are very blue.

‘I wanted to say,’ he says, his lips twitching away to reveal that rare, gap-toothed smile of which he is typically so ashamed, ‘that I think I see another one. On the back of your head.’

Fitzjames turns with what even he has to admit is perilously close to a flounce.

Hard to explain, he thinks, to one such as Francis. To Francis, a rescue means recognition – and more, it means vindication, it means reuniting with Ross, it means a return to an Admiralty that is not near as ashamed as it ought to be, it means his usual dogged, simmering righteousness, the anger that sets him alight like a heretic saint. It means, possibly, Miss Cracroft, who will surely look more kindly on the suit of the man who conducted them to safety and would have guided them to glory had he been attended to earlier. To Francis, every grey hair is a kiss on the forehead from a tardy but determined Providence. His square face and sturdy frame were built for years as surely as they were built for all the other burdens he shoulders. To Francis, each additional year is a flowering.

To Fitzjames, well.

Fitzjames’s existence, as Francis’s, rests on proof. Proof that his worth is not contingent on his being wanted, or owned. He, as is Francis, is operating with a substantial deficit, though of a slightly different nature. He cannot presume he belongs; he has not that luxury. Therefore, he must build capital otherwhere. He works harder, shines brighter. He dazzles, because that is the most expedient way. While they are blinking away the glare from his freedom of the city of Liverpool, or his midnight raids in Syria, his lineage is less likely to catch their eye.

In this it helps – it has always helped – that Fitzjames does not care if he dies. Or rather, that the choice for him has never been between life and death, but between death and obscurity. And that choice is no choice at all. So Fitzjames has made a career of bubble reputations and cannon’s mouths, leaping lightly from near-miss to dazzling near-miss. He has accumulated stories and scars in the doing and presses them both into service at will.

Fitzjames has made a habit of almost-dying. Almost-dying is an art, like everything else. He does it exceptionally well. He assumed that he would continue to outrun Death, or shake it off, until he emphatically, gloriously and suddenly could not.

His most recent near-miss is a different matter altogether. For one thing, he was rescued. To Francis, the rescue is vindication, proof of Ross’s devotion, of their enduring patient love. Fitzjames is no stranger to a rescue, but being on the receiving end of one has him burning to seek out every person he has plucked from the water or pushed out of the way of cannonade and sue them, on his knees, for their forgiveness. The best that he can plead is ignorance: he did not know, he did not know what it was to need saving or he would not have subjected them to it.

A rescue is a sniper’s bullet that Fitzjames was incapable of outrunning or walking off, but – shamefully – had to be helped out of [3]. A rescue is a snivelling abject thing: fingers down his throat, hands dragging a body too feeble to protest back to a ship, nursemaiding him back into a life that has outrun nothing but its course.

It’s only a grey hair, says Francis in his innocence. Only a grey hair, only – already – two grey hairs. Only gout, only rheumy eyes and stiffening limbs and the rest of his teeth lost, abjectly, to walnuts he is no longer able to crack himself. Only a fading, only a diminishing, only arms full of a hectic and rapidly-vanishing past instead of a short but gilded future. Only and already subjection to greater powers and fleeter feet than himself, only the rot of his faculties, as though the scurvy had never gone anywhere after all.

It’s life, he thinks, a long life with no function save to prolong itself. He knows, and has always known, that that is no life for him.

Enterprise’s surgeon comes to his cabin later, speaking volubly about the curiously-shaped crystals the petty officers brought back for his perusal. When Fitzjames picks one up to the light, it has a pulsing glow. He thinks of Goodsir and his earnest, all-imbuing love for even the most unforgiving landscapes. He thinks of himself, smiling wryly over his shoulder as the man discoursed with a gentle evangelical zeal about the most unprepossessing of subjects. He thinks of Ross, good Ross, hale and handsome Ross, Ross handling him with a hateful gentleness, of Francis cradling his jaw and massaging his throat, Francis’s thumb moving over his knuckles and springing away to pry his mouth open. He thinks of thick fingers forcing their way past his lips, down his throat, to impel his reflexes into one final, desperate, traitorous spasm. He thinks of his eyes shutting, Francis calling an urgent ‘James!’ and he thinks that before, he would have known whom Francis meant.

If I had known it would come to this pass, he thinks as he looks into the umber eye of the crystal, I might have saved the price of a berth and stayed still for that musket ball.

Fitzjames is silent over dinner. He suffers himself to be undressed in silence, and silently reads the Metamorphoses before he sleeps. He goes to bed with Echo and Narcissus behind his eyelids, and wakes up in no very good temper.

He walks to his mirror and tells himself he will not pluck out that grey hair. He will not even look at it. He has only just begun to look at himself in the glass again, at a body that is not eating itself whole and where the map of his history has not begun to redraw itself in old wounds gushing new blood. The wretched thing is even springing up from the same place where he first noticed the fine line of blood at his temple. A hideous flower of his most fruitful shames.

James shuts his eyes and tells himself that from now on he is on a ration of the morbs. Once, now, and that is sufficient for the day. He opens his eyes again and sees a movement behind him. He turns sharply away from the mirror, and finds himself staring into his own face.

Or not precisely his own face. The skin is smoother, the grooves by the sides of his mouth less pronounced. His jaw, too, slopes down to its pointed chin, suggesting rather than insisting on the emphatic pentagon that now looks out at him from the glass. The lips are his, even the shapes at their corners are familiar, but the way he holds them is –

‘Who are you?’ says the apparition, and James jolts. His voice, but lighter. The shoulders are broad, narrowing almost comically to his waist. Large hands and feet, the whole frame still reeling from a last exuberant overflow of growth the year before. He’s gangling, God’s wounds, that raw redness in his thin cheeks and the hands he wouldn’t grow into for another ten years, and if he closes his eyes he can hear the scream of the gulls and the bustle and horse-chaunters of Liverpool –

‘Who are you?’ says the boy again, and good Christ, did he sound like that? Like this bristling infant, ready to tug at a teacher’s elbow and rend his clothing about a petty schoolyard slight?

‘I think you know,’ says Fitzjames. ‘I know who you are.’

‘You have the advantage of me then,’ says the boy, squaring his shoulders and reaching for a drawl. Nearly convincing, except his voice is shaking.

‘I,’ says Fitzjames, ‘am you. Ten - ’ he pauses and shuts his eyes in bitter self-recrimination – he is trying to wean himself of threadbare vanities – ‘Fifteen years older. But you, nevertheless.’

‘Impossible,’ says the boy.

Fitzjames, who has fired a rocket into the not-quite-inhuman face of a charging monster, smiles thinly.

‘Impossible,’ says the boy again, with the emphasis of one clinging to a vanishing certainty. He looks as though he is about to say it again, but changes his mind and says ‘absurd.’

‘You are James Fitzjames,’ says Fitzjames, ‘you received your mate’s warrant very recently, or you will very shortly.’

The boy starts back and nods. ‘I did a month ago,’ he says, and is unable to keep the glow from his voice.

‘You make a habit of telling people that you were the youngest master’s mate on board the Winchester.’ The boy flushes and sets his jaw, and Fitzjames continues: ‘You have resigned, or are about to resign, your post on the Winchester to set sail on the Tigris. Your uncle will chide you for your impetuosity and you will remind him that he was the one who introduced you to Chesney, and you must presume you meant for him to aid you. The nasturtiums are in bloom in Rose Hill. You missed them terribly. You will miss them rather worse.’

‘How do you - ’

‘Your uncle wanted you to go up to the University, and you didn’t, and you don’t regret it, but you don’t like to talk about the St Vincent.’

The boy tosses his head. ‘It doesn’t matter how I got my post there - ’

‘It did. It did for some time. You were bitter about it.’ Fitzjames pauses and blinks. ‘You still are, I suppose. Curious. I hadn’t thought about that in some time.’ He looks at the boy. ‘I suppose we could play quite the comedy of my telling you of moles on brows or secret scars, but you have not any.’ He cannot quite identify the thing in his voice when he says ‘Not yet.’

The boy is trembling, fists clenched by his side. ‘Did you do this?’

Fitzjames is very nearly impressed at the young bantam’s instant pugnacity. As though a cataclysmic impossibility is naught but a particularly uncouth insult. ‘I did not.’

‘What is happening?’

Fitzjames shakes his head. ‘I do not know.’

‘Is this a dream?’

That does seem likelier. Fitzjames reaches out a hand and pinches the boy’s upper arm. The flesh beneath his fingers is supple and smooth and tight, whipcord muscles twitching and flexing. The boy’s yelp is of a particular and pedantic affront, a dandy whose cane has been knocked into a cowpat by a careening urchin.

He lets his gaze travel up his arm and into his eyes. The boy’s lip is curling and his nostrils are flared, his eyes are blazing into Fitzjames’s own.

I know you, thinks Fitzjames, feeling the blood rise in his cheeks and in the boy’s arm, oh Christ, I know you.

‘Not a dream,’ says the boy, and Fitzjames realises that he has been staring. He drops his hand.

‘No,’ he says, ‘not a dream.’

‘Can you think why you might be here?’

The boy shakes his head. ‘Where am I?’

‘You are on the Enterprise, a little south of Baffin Bay.’

The boy’s head shoots up. ‘The Ross expedition?’

‘A Ross expedition,’ says Fitzjames, his mouth twisting at the hunger in the boy’s eyes. ‘A rescue for the men of the Franklin expedition.’

The boy leans forward, lips parted. ‘Did you find them?’

Fitzjames winces. ‘I was one of them.’

The boy frowns and opens his mouth to speak, his long hand rising as if to call his schoolmaster’s attention to himself. Fitzjames seizes his wrist.

‘What is that on your hand?’

The boy looks down and recoils. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never – what is that?’

Fitzjames turns the boy’s palm up to the light. There are markings there: long grooves cut in the shape of wigwams, or canes, or curls that look near enough to Arabic that Fitzjames finds he has his nose pressed almost to the hollow of his palm before he knows what he is about.

He straightens abruptly, nearly bumping the boy’s head, bent studiously over his.

‘Well?’ says the boy, a peremptory snap. Fitzjames finds his own mouth tightening.

‘I do not recognise the script. It looks - ’ familiar is not the word, but Fitzjames can hazard a guess. ‘I suspect it’s Inuktitut.’ He watches as the boy considers whether to pretend he already knows and begin a sage nod before scowling and looking a question. ‘The script of the Esquimaux.’

The boy’s eyes brighten. ‘Well, we must find one. Bring them here and - ’

‘We’re on the open sea,’ says Fitzjames, ‘at long last, after having run aground for longer than I care to think.’

‘Well, can we not - ’

‘Make for Baffin Bay?’ says Fitzjames, ‘and risk another winter at Port Leopold? No.’

The boy scowls again. ‘Do you have any suggestions, or are you simply delighting in pouring cold water over everything I think of?’

Fitzjames frowns. ‘I am merely pointing out - ’

‘Do you have,’ says the boy, ‘a course of action to suggest? Any course? Any action?’

Fitzjames hopes devoutly that his scowl does not mirror the boy’s, and thinks uneasily that it might. He relaxes his brow with a profound muscular effort and says ‘We need to find someone who can decipher this for us.’

‘Captain Sir John Ross?’

Fitzjames thinks of that august personage, and finds his lips pulling up into a smile radiating a positively Crozieresque poison. ‘He is not here.’ And will, God willing, never be allowed near anything better than a fifth-class frigate for the remainder of his years.

‘Commander Clark Ross?’

‘Captain Clark Ross now,’ says Fitzjames, ‘and no.’

‘Captain? Yes, of course,’ the boy nods, a quick satisfied thing, glowing with a serious pride that makes Fitzjames’s heart hurt queerly. ‘He would know, would he not?’

Ross would, in all probability, but Fitzjames is disinclined to add to his debt with him. ‘No, I said.’

‘He would know,’ says the boy, with a confident and surely misplaced warmth of tone.

‘I do not doubt it,’ says Fitzjames, ‘but I am curiously averse to parading before him a twenty-year-old stowaway whose presence neither one of us can explain and whose resemblance to me calls more than a little attention to itself.’

The boy scowls again. ‘I don’t think there’s a resemblance.’

‘Well,’ says Fitzjames, with what he thinks is commendable restraint, ‘there is. And there is still the small matter of how you came to be here. We shall have to find another way.’

‘Well?’ says the boy.

Fitzjames sighs and scrubs a hand over his eyes. He knows the answer, and it is not a palatable one. ‘We need to talk to Francis.’

He finds more woollens for the boy. His worsted and lambswool may do very well for Liverpool, but he must be better braced to venture on deck, and Fitzjames himself thinks that he will now carry always a splinter of ice lodged far enough beneath his skin that no fire will ever be able to reach it or thaw it. He wears one of Fitzjames’s guernseys and it looks well enough on him. The trousers are a more vexed question, but after procuring a knife and causing Fitzjames’s belt grievous injury they are secured to the boy’s absurd waist, though flapping perilously about his slender hips.

He finds a scarf and hands it to the boy, who casts his eyes heavenwards. ‘I don’t need to be taken out in a bath chair, you know.’

‘Do not,’ says Fitzjames, ‘tempt me.’

He finds slops for the boy and fusses with his scarf until he is sure that only a pair of dark eyes are glaring balefully out at him over a snug nest of wool and below the hat he has fitted over his head.

‘Don’t pout,’ he says, ‘you’re wearing the lendings of a Commander. I’ve given you a promotion, rather earlier than you would have earned it.’ He pulls gloves over the boy’s fingers, stifling a grin at his sniff.

‘Commander?’ the boy asks, his voice muffled but indignant, ‘Aren’t you a Captain yet?’

Fitzjames pauses in the pulling on of his own gloves. ‘Firstly,’ he says, ‘I am only five-and-thirty. That is rather young to be in a ferment about captaincy, and you would only be told to bide if you were in a crotchet about it. And secondly, yes. As it happens, yes, I am a Captain.’

The sniff is a little mollified this time.

Once Fitzjames is satisfied that nobody can see who is beneath the slops, he goes out onto the main deck and asks for a gig to be put to. The boy scrambles down and sits abaft, looking east and west with huge eyes. His thin legs fold up nearly by his ears like a concertina or a needlessly-hinged telescope. The oars pick their way through the ice and slice through the waters, and the boy cranes his neck and twists in his seat enough to set the boat rocking.

Fitzjames makes his way, as discreetly as possible to the stern, finds the boy’s elbow to still him and says quietly ‘Recall that you are meant to be on this expedition lawfully. The greenest of ship’s boys would be quite inured to the sight of a ‘bergy fragment or two by now.’

How he knows he cannot tell, but he knows the boy is flushing. He hears a determined breath, and then he is still, though thrummed with an energy that Fitzjames can feel in his own blood.

When they reach the Investigator, Fitzjames shins up, offering a hand to the boy which is promptly disdained. He asks to speak to Captain Crozier and is shown to the Great Cabin.

‘James?’ says Francis, looking up with eyebrows raised. ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.’ He has a glad smile on his lips. Fitzjames nods at him and ushers the boy in. The smile freezes and then begins to dim. Fitzjames slides the door shut behind him.

‘James, what’s the mat - ’

Fitzjames will admit that his besetting sin is a weakness for the theatre. There is no particular reason for him to pluck off the boy’s hat, or indeed for the boy to fall into eager lock-step and pull down his scarf, but there’s a satisfaction to seeing the puzzlement dawn on Francis’s lovely face, bedding down into shock.

‘What – who is this?’

The boy speaks. ‘James Fitzjames, lately of the Winchester.’

There is a frown in Francis’s eyes. ‘I don’t understand. Is this some sort of jest?’

Fitzjames shakes his head. ‘No jest, Francis. I – I recognise him. He is me – me as I was, te - ’ He breaks off and clenches his jaw.

‘Fifteen,’ says the boy, with distinct relish.

‘ – Fifteen years ago.’ He nods to the boy. ‘Show him your palm.’

The boy steps forward smartly, eyes on Francis. He strips his hand, pulling off the glove one finger at a time, and Fitzjames does not restrain the impulse to sigh out loud at the mummery. He places his hand on the table and turns it over under Francis’s gaze.

Francis looks up sharply at the boy, and then at Fitzjames. ‘May I?’ he says, gesturing to his hand. The boy hesitates and then nods. Francis picks up the boy’s hand, wrist cradled gently in his large rough palm, and bends over the marks.

‘I believe they’re Inuktitut,’ says Fitzjames. Francis glances at him briefly and nods before returning to his task.

‘I cannot very well make it out,’ he confesses after an examination that has both Fitzjames and the boy fidgeting. ‘These characters here…’ and he circles them gently on the boy’s palm while the boy squirms, ‘pertain to seeing, I think. And here, this – saqqilli? – is to show, or be shown.’ He looks up at the boy. ‘You were brought here, I think, to learn something.’

‘Learn something?’ says the boy. ‘From him?’

Fitzjames opens his mouth to respond, and Francis has a hand on his arm. ‘From him especially,’ he says.

‘Why now?’

Francis shakes his head. ‘I do not know.’

‘Something about the Arctic, perhaps?’

‘Perhaps,’ says Francis, ‘you have not been to the Poles yet.’

The boy shakes his head. ‘Portugal and Malta. I’ve never – but I suppose,’ he says, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs, ‘it all becomes much of a muchness.’

The boy accompanies the words with a weary sigh and a wag of the head. The effect is only somewhat diminished by the quick glance he throws at his audience beneath his lashes. Francis is surveying him with twitching lips, but Fitzjames sees no reason for such indulgence. ‘He could hardly sit still in the gig,’ he tells Francis, and the boy scowls at him. ‘He was thrashing about like a harpooned eel. The veriest landlubber.’

The boy blushes hotly and Francis ducks his head, biting his cheek. When he has schooled his countenance, he raises his head. ‘It takes us all,’ he says to the boy, so gently Fitzjames wants to kick something, preferably Francis.

‘So,’ says the boy, leaning forward, ‘is there something I must know about this expedition, then?’

‘Not this expedition, perhaps,’ says Fitzjames, ‘but the expedition it came to rescue.’ He looks at Francis. ‘That must be it.’

Francis is frowning. ‘You’d tell him of all that occurred?’ A familiar inward snarl tugs at the corner of his lips. ‘That’ll be a long list, James.’

‘It is testimony,’ says Fitzjames, ‘and quite possibly the most significant of my life.’

The boy has his hands clasped on the table. ‘Tell me,’ he says, ‘tell me everything.’

Francis looks at him with an eyebrow raised. ‘I doubt you’ve the stomach for everything, lad.’

‘I do,’ says the boy, ‘I know you. The Parry expedition. The planned Ross expedition.’

Fitzjames can see Francis’s shoulders stiffening. ‘I was on both, yes.’

‘What was it like?’

Francis stares at the boy. Quietly, he says ‘what do you want to know?’

‘Everything,’ says the boy again. ‘You redrew maps, Captain, you carved England into new ground.’

Fitzjames can see Francis’s shoulders pulling in. ‘You’ll have to bear the raptures for the two of us,’ he says, ‘England’s glories are not mine.’

Nor, thinks Fitzjames, are they entirely his, or the boy’s.

The boy, however, bristles with all the zealotry of a borrowed patrimony. ‘What are your glories, then,’ he says, ‘if it will not do for you to see more and venture further than will be given to any of your fellows?’

Francis lifts his head. ‘I will not tell you of glories,’ he says, ‘because I suspect you have a bellyful of them already.’ He leans forward. ‘You’re not thinking of the ABs, or the petty officers, who were on the expedition because they were paid to be. So I’ll tell you of Sir John Franklin, who strove to lead the expedition on sea because he could not govern a colony on land.’ The boy opens his mouth and Francis continues: ‘Or of Captain Francis Crozier, who was on the expedition because he was commanded to go, and who thought his obedience would mean …’ his mouth twists, ‘advancement.’

‘Francis - ’ says Fitzjames, putting a hand on his arm.

One of Francis’s own comes up to cover it, a quick quelling motion. ‘What will you hear?’ he says, ‘Will you hear of the victuallers who secured the contract to supply us with provisions because they were the cheapest by a furlong? Will you hear why that was? Or about the creature on the ice?’

‘The creature?’ says the boy, ‘what sort of creature?’

Fitzjames and Francis tell the boy as much as they can, and watch his lip pull into a perfectly-articulated curl.

‘Old wives’ tales,’ he says, ‘born of winter and sickness.’

‘A fine time to choose scepticism,’ says Fitzjames, ‘with your palm filled with writing from a people you’ve never seen in a land you’ve never before visited, sitting face-to-face with yourself.’

The boy flushes. ‘I do not have another explanation for what has happened to me,’ he says, ‘but a bear would do for your creature well enough, I suppose.’

‘Suppose away, then,’ says Francis.

‘Tuunbaq is not the point at issue,’ says Fitzjames, ‘not when we may well have avoided a year’s winter, and found rescue earlier or not needed it at all, had we heeded you, Francis.’ He pauses. ‘Had I heeded you.’

Francis looks at him, a very long look with very blue eyes very full of a meaning Fitzjames cannot comprehend. He says ‘You give me altogether too much credit.’

‘I do not,’ says Fitzjames, ‘we were on the brink of a precipice. It was then, more than at any other time, that judgement had consequence. Had the right judgement been applied - ’

‘You could have found the Passage?’ says the boy. ‘But Captain Sir John prevented it?’

‘It’s heroes and villains you’re wanting, boyo,’ says Francis, ‘a grand story for the children.’ He sighs. ‘There’ll be none of those here.’

‘That isn’t true,’ says Fitzjames.

‘I should have remembered I was talking to two of you now,’ says Francis, with an inward smile. ‘It’s true, nonetheless.’ He turns to the boy. ‘There was no hope of us finding the Passage,’ he says. ‘The question, very speedily, was only ever of coming away on our feet or feet-first.’

Fitzjames purses his lips. ‘We got closer than any expedition had before.’

‘And cold enough comfort that was to us in the end,’ says Francis.

‘But if we had loaded up Terror when Erebus was lamed - ’

‘There would still have been the tins, and Tuunbaq, and whatever else was waiting for us.’ Francis sighs. ‘We weren’t meant to be here, James, and we were sent by men who only ever saw us as instruments, and unfit for any other purpose.’

‘You might be,’ says the boy, ‘but I am not.’ Fitzjames looks at the boy and he continues ‘It is evident enough why the expedition failed.’

Francis is watching him. ‘Enlighten us, then.’

The boy turns on him. ‘You were bedevilled, I see that, and once I have the opportunity I will put your case to the comptroller - ’

‘If you have the opportunity,’ says Francis, ‘and if they listen. They never have before.’

‘Not to you,’ says the boy, and Fitzjames can feel the stillness settle on Francis, ‘and why would they? Why would they, if all you brought them was this – this womanish hand-wringing?’

‘Look here,’ says Fitzjames, but the boy is well away.

‘This is whom you think I am meant to be attending?’ he says, stabbing a finger at Francis, ‘this Friday-face who cannot even give me a warning without shaking his head about its futility?’

Fitzjames is on his feet before he knows it, but curiously Francis anticipates him, a hand on his shoulder and a ‘James, if you please’ in his ear.

‘I shall do perfectly well here,’ says Fitzjames, at precisely the same moment that the boy says ‘I am not afraid of anything he might say.’

Fitzjames sees Francis’s lips twitch, and suffers himself to be bundled, gently but inexorably, in the direction of Francis’s berth.

‘You’ve never lost hold of your temper quite so easily before,’ says Francis quietly, once he has slid the door shut behind him, ‘not even with me, and Christ knows I gave you more provocation.’

‘You were my superior officer,’ says Fitzjames, ‘and you – God in heaven, Francis, there is no comparison between the two of you.’

Francis laughs softly. ‘I suppose not, but that’s hardly a kind thing to say to me.’

Fitzjames does not well understand that, and does not pretend to. ‘He’s a coxcomb, Francis.’

‘He’s young,’ says Francis, ‘and unscathed,’ and he adds, so quietly Fitzjames feels for a moment that he is eavesdropping, ‘and Christ, but he’s beautiful.’

He looks sharply up at Fitzjames, a blush creeping up his cheeks and radiating out to the tips of his ears. Fitzjames wishes furiously that he could look at his feet or affect deafness only temporarily, but the entirety of his acquaintance with Francis has been characterised by a painful attention to anything that is said by, to or about him, and he is not about to depart from that habit now.

Francis clears his throat and says ‘Come, have you collected yourself?’

‘I was perfectly collected already,’ says Fitzjames, ‘but I will not mill the little fribble down, if that is what you mean.’

Francis cocks an eyebrow at him and ushers him out again.

The boy is sitting with his arms folded and his jaw out-thrust, but Fitzjames sees the set of his shoulders, sits down and waits.

‘I ought not,’ he says with some care to Francis, ‘to have used those words. I apologise.’

Francis gives him a gentle smile, entirely in the eyes. ‘It’s of no consequence.’

‘It is only,’ continues the boy, ‘that if you did not seek glory, or believe in it at all, this expedition was a curious place to be, and a curious thing to expect to succeed.’

Francis shrugs. ‘I did not expect it to succeed.’

‘Well, then!’ says the boy.

‘A confident expectation of glory,’ says Fitzjames, ‘offers no surety of it at all.’

‘No,’ says the boy, who seems unconvinced, ‘but if you were all of you to embark upon the journey in the confident expectation of needing rescue, are you surprised that it came to pass?’

‘For God’s sake,’ says Fitzjames, ‘Sir John expected us to succeed. He needed us to succeed to reclaim himself. That was a poor enough shield for us.’

‘Shield,’ says the boy, lip curling back from his teeth, ‘Surety. You sound like a clerk at Lloyd’s. If I had thought I would grow to be such a -’

Francis strikes the table once, sharply. ‘I’ll advise you now, boy,’ he says, ‘to think very carefully about how you complete that sentence.’

The boy is looking at Francis with wide eyes.

‘I was commanded, as I have said,’ says Francis, ‘and Sir John was driven to prove himself. You’ve not asked why James was on the expedition. James believed, you see. James believed in glory, and possibility, and adventure.’

Fitzjames fidgets. ‘It was an expedient way to advancement,’ he says.

Francis throws him a look. ‘An experiment with modesty, James? It doesn’t become you.’ Over Fitzjames’s affronted snort, he turns back to the boy. ‘He believed. And the burden of believing, and of driving the men forward and together, fell upon him whole and entire after he lost one captain to the monster and another to drink.’

‘Francis - ’

‘Whisht now, if he needs to learn, he needs to learn it all.’

The boy’s eyes are on Francis as he continues: ‘He had to give the men heart in a winter without end, and with every possible road ahead narrowing and darkening before him. He used up all of himself until all there was left of him was old wounds. I lost him, all but, and his last thought was for his men.’ He pauses and says ‘You do not deserve to know you grew into such a man, but if you cannot contrive gratitude, you will – at least – keep a civil tongue in your head about him while you are in my company.’

Fitzjames is looking at Francis, who is staring ahead of him. Fitzjames can only see his well-loved profile, awash in scarlet and looking abashed but defiant. For his own part, Fitzjames is feeling entirely unsettled. His blood seems to be bubbling and he does not think he can trust himself to speak. He looks down at his hands on the table and, when he has collected himself somewhat, raises his head towards the boy.

He is staring at Francis, his cheeks pinkening and an arrested look in his eyes. As Fitzjames watches, the tip of his tongue peeks out to moisten his parted lips.

Oh, God defend us, thinks Fitzjames.

‘We had better go,’ he announces.

Francis looks a little startled. ‘Now? We haven’t discussed what we are to do about - ’ he gestures towards the boy and adds ‘the boy here.’

The boy tosses his head and Fitzjames cannot quite forbear casting his eyes heavenwards. ‘I suspect, before we burden him with stratagems, he will need a night to reflect on what he has learned so far, do you not think?’

‘I can take it,’ says the boy with some indignation.

‘Nevertheless,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I think that we had better return to the Enterprise, before the length of our absence is remarked.’

‘Would you not be expected to remain on the Investigator for a good length of time,’ returns the boy, ‘if you were discussing weighty matters with the Captain?’

The oleaginous little jackal casts a sidelong glance at Francis under his lashes as he speaks. Francis’s eyes are moving between him and Fitzjames and he seems disinclined to speak.

‘You are correct, of course,’ says Fitzjames, with abrupt and threatening sweetness, ‘one would expect, in fact, rather more in the way of entertainment from Captain Crozier. Francis,’ he says, turning to the man, ‘will you have us for dinner?’

‘James,’ says Francis.

‘It is only Captain Fitzjames and Mr Fitzjames from the Enterprise. You might need to strain your powers of invention for a passable tale for your cook to explain the midshipman’s appearance, but I trust that he has a score of plausible explanations up his sleeve.’

‘James,’ says Francis again. The boy is flushing darkly.

‘We take your point,’ says Francis, and the ‘we’ is lost neither on Fitzjames nor on the boy. ‘I’ll call a gig for the pair of you.’

The boy sniffs, but seems to acquiesce. ‘But,’ he says, ‘we will return, will we not?’ He lifts his eyes to Francis. ‘I have not heard the half of the tale from the Captain.’

‘I can tell you what you need to know,’ says Fitzjames, and the boy shoots him a quick look.

‘Shall I not need both your accounts?’ says the boy, and pulls at his bottom lip with his teeth.

The little hussy. Fitzjames is about to open his mouth to say that the boy will be confined to Fitzjames’s quarters and will receive such information only as he, Fitzjames, sees fit to give him, the boy, when Francis says ‘Come tomorrow. I’ll have the cook put out cold rations. I might be allowed the occasional visitor without making an inventory to him.’

‘Thank you,’ says the boy. Francis meets Fitzjames’s look with a quiet ‘Let me help, James. Hmmm?’

Fitzjames casts his eyes heavenwards but nods. The boy, brightening, draws his scarf to him. Then he unbuttons his slops enough to smooth the scarf with a long, deliberate motion, his large hand crawling up and down his own front. Seemingly satisfied, he tilts his own head to reveal the curve of a slender white throat.

‘I wouldn’t wish my scarf to slip,’ he explains to Fitzjames, and slants a look towards Francis.

‘Would you not,’ says Fitzjames. Francis does not speak.

The boy winds the scarf about his throat in long movements, his eyes falling half-shut, as though he is fashioning himself an embrace or a noose. When, at great length, he seems to be satisfied, he pulls the scarf slowly over his mouth and nods to Fitzjames.

‘By your leave, then, Francis,’ says Fitzjames. The boy does not speak but executes a bow, curious and courtly and with an angular beauty, all long thin legs and large hands and dark eyes peering up over the scarf he has invested with the ritual splendour of a visor. Francis stares down at him, his lovely mobile face flickering between amusement and wonderment and the beginnings of something that Fitzjames tells himself he does not recognise.

‘Come on,’ he says to the boy, taking his elbow. The boy lets out a cry that he hurriedly stifles, and Fitzjames murmurs an apology and is ready to chastise himself for his newly-learned brutishness until he sees the glinting look the boy throws at him.

The little toad.

He hustles the two of them onto the gig. The boy spends the ride in silence, hands folded primly in his bony lap. Fitzjames pleads a slight headache that night, but a powerful appetite, and asks for a cold collation to be sent to the cabin. He and the boy eat in silence, until Fitzjames ventures ‘Did you wish to ask me anything?’

The boy looks at him – have Fitzjames’s eyes always taken on this particular shade of green in the lamplight? – and tilts his head. ‘About what?’

‘About the expedition. About the creature.’ Fitzjames pauses and continues ‘About Francis – Captain Crozier.’

The boy surveys him for a long moment. His tongue comes out again to wipe delicately over his lip. ‘You are an authority on the subject of the Captain.’

Fitzjames has never before had quite such trouble reading his own face or voice. The boy’s words do not seem to make a question, a statement, a challenge, or an accusation, and yet he finds his shoulders stiffening. He says ‘Not especially.’

The boy’s eyes remain on his as he says ‘I do not have anything of significance to ask you.’ He pauses. ‘About the Captain.’

Fitzjames compels himself not to bristle, nods and says ‘I will find you clothes.’

He produces a nightshirt and busies himself with Metamorphoses while the boy changes.

‘You had better take the berth,’ he says.

‘Where will you sleep?’ says the boy.

Fitzjames gestures towards the chair. ‘I shall do well enough.’

The boy frowns. ‘I think that I had better take the chair.’

‘You did not ask to be here,’ says Fitzjames.

‘Or you ask to have me here,’ says the boy, ‘and besides, I am better equipped to - ’

‘I am five-and-thirty,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I have some years to go before I can converse with Methuselah.’ He makes for the chair and sits down, feeling the boy’s eyes on him and looking resolutely away.

Fitzjames is no stranger to vigils of this nature, and there is some comfort to be had in the thought that in the berth before him is not a comrade struggling to or from the bourn of sickness, despair or drink, but a hale – if insufferable – youth wearing Fitzjames’s face and Fitzjames’s clothes and lying in Fitzjames’s bed.

Still, there are some comforts that he had promised himself he would give nightly thanks for, and very nearly chief among them were warmth and a firm mattress. And because of those comforts, Fitzjames is unpractised in the bivouacer’s arts, chiefly of slipping into the waking sleep of the night watchman.

The boy says, after one or two resentful hours, ‘This bunk is quite large.’

‘Is it,’ says Fitzjames.

‘Larger than I had supposed for a vessel of this sort.’

‘Yes,’ says Fitzjames, ‘well, consider this a part of your lesson.’

‘It is really quite large.’

‘I shall make note of it.’

‘Fitzjames.’

‘Oh, very well.’

Fitzjames rises stiffly and makes his way to the bunk. The boy is sitting up, a spectral figure in the moonlight, and though Fitzjames cannot make out his features he knows the boy is scowling.

‘If you find yourself cribbed,’ he says, ‘do not repine. I did warn you.’

‘Oh, for goodness’s sake,’ says the boy. Fitzjames undresses quickly and gets in. He holds himself stiffly, waiting for the boy’s breath to even out.

‘Are you waiting for me to fall asleep?’ comes the boy’s voice.

Fitzjames sighs. ‘Are you minded to stay awake only to spite me?’

‘No,’ says the boy. ‘I only – I am not accustomed to this.’

Fitzjames turns his head. In the dark of the room, he can only discern the faint outlines of the boy’s brow and nose. ‘I can assure you I am an entire novice in meeting my younger self as well.’

‘Not that,’ says the boy, ‘sharing a bed.’

Fitzjames says nothing. In the fifteen intervening years, he has remained completely innocent of that particular experience as well. Such embraces as he has known have been, of necessity, rapid, furtive and emphatically vertical. He does not quite know what to do with the shifts of the long thin body so close to his, the breath whose pace is slowing to match his, or perhaps his own is picking up to match the boy’s. The warmth of him, alien and familiar all at once, reaches long disquieting tendrils to the side of him closest to the boy.

‘Get as much sleep as you can,’ is all he says.

Fitzjames is not entirely sure when he does manage to fall asleep, but it must be all at once, and sound at that. He wakes up on his side with something lodged directly beneath his chin. He blinks and squints down at a thatch of soft dark hair. The boy has curled up half-atop Fitzjames, a long arm thrown about his waist and one leg between his.

‘James,’ says Fitzjames quietly. The boy does not stir. Fitzjames lifts the hand not currently trapped beneath the boy and rests it on one shoulder. He means to shake the boy, but something in him is disinclined to rudeness towards the pliant, untroubled weight pinning him. Instead he moves his hand insistently but gently down the boy’s flank.

‘James,’ he says again. The boy sighs in response, nuzzling Fitzjames. Fitzjames feels his heart squeeze and expels a breath. It stirs the dark hair beneath his chin and the boy sniffs, rubbing his cheek against Fitzjames’s chest. Fitzjames is minded of Fagin, and smiles despite himself.

That said, it is nearly eight bells, and they must bestir themselves. Fitzjames can ask for cold rations again, but he must be out of bed to do it, or rather the boy cannot be seen to be in bed with him.

‘James,’ he says, more insistently.  When the boy sighs again Fitzjames brings his hand to his shoulder and presses, once. The boy leans into the touch and shifts on Fitzjames’s chest. Fitzjames swallows and says, again, shaking the boy’s shoulder: ‘James’.

The boy wakes all at once. This Fitzjames remembers: no drowsy gathering of himself in bits and pieces, but an instantaneous bound from dreaming to waking. His eyes slam open and he jolts up, nearly taking Fitzjames’s head off. He stares into Fitzjames’s eyes, large hands braced on either side of his head. Fitzjames stares back. The boy’s – Fitzjames’s – nightshirt is slipping off one shoulder, and a sharp collarbone is gleaming in the light.

Fitzjames clears his throat. ‘It is time we were waking,’ he explains, and swallows at the rumble of his own voice.

The boy’s eyes widen at the sound. He looks down at himself, hovering over Fitzjames’s body; the leg tangled between Fitzjames’s; the indentation on Fitzjames’s shirt-front where his cheek was pressed to Fitzjames’s bosom. He flushes and scrambles quickly off Fitzjames, leaving a rush of chill air behind him.

‘I only meant - ’ says Fitzjames.

‘Yes, of course,’ says the boy. He whirls around, clutching his borrowed trousers, shirts and guernsey to his chest like a waif or a maiden. There is a spot of scarlet in each thin cheek and his chin is tilted. ‘I will get dressed now.’

Fitzjames nods. The line of the boy’s shoulder beneath his nightshirt is gleaming like the ridge of a glacier.

‘If you could turn your back while I dress,’ says the boy. The words come out softly.

‘Of course,’ says Fitzjames, his own cheeks burning, and turns his back. He busies himself pulling on his boots and sends a silent apology in thought to the steward whom he is sure to baffle when he appears hosed and shod.

‘May I turn around now?’ he asks, when he judges that a decorous interval has passed.

‘Yes,’ says the boy, his voice muffled. Fitzjames turns and sees the boy pulling on his guernsey. His long thin body reaches and contorts and ripples beneath the wool. Fitzjames’s eye moves down to the curve of his narrow waist and has an image, immediate and terrifying, of walking over and placing his hands about it and squeezing until the tips of his fingers meet. He puts his own hand over the rise of his own hip, fine still but without this heedless frangibility.

He looks away and clears his throat. The boy pulls down the guernsey and reaches for his coat.

They are rowed over to the Investigator, and Francis is waiting for them, even reaching down to offer Fitzjames and the boy his hand up on deck. The boy, to Fitzjames’s complete lack of surprise, keeps hold of Francis’s hand fully a minute longer than is strictly necessary, with a ‘Thank you, Captain’ that the boy probably intends to be demurely beckoning, without reckoning with the generous carapace of wool covering his mouth. Francis drops the boy’s hand and gestures towards the wardroom. They both follow, the boy – of course – rather closer than Fitzjames. For all the world as though he’d get lost on deck.

Francis has clearly considered at some length the particular history of their expedition. With Fitzjames, he lays out the points at which better judgement, or foreknowledge, could have steered them onto a very different course, the points at which human venality or simple hubris blew them astray. He is unsparing to himself, which Fitzjames thinks he must tolerate, but there are times and to spare that he needs to intervene when the tendency veers into self-flagellation.

The boy listens attentively, or at the very least he is paying attention to Francis, even if Fitzjames is not quite convinced that he has heard a word of what he is saying. His eyes are burning into Francis, hungry and intent, and his lips are parted as though to suck up every atom of air that leaves Francis’s mouth. Unbidden, the thought comes to Fitzjames’s mind of his old tutor at Rose Hill, and himself lingering behind in the schoolroom to ask about a declension that he knew up and down already. He bends over his luncheon, roiling with remembered shame and present fury.

Surely, he thinks, he would never make so bold as this, had never made so bold as this. Not for want of desire. Never that: that tutor! His hands curving over the spine of his Horace! Francis, with his hands folded behind his back, stumping ill-temperedly fore and aft the deck of Terror. Francis, with his curling inward venomous smile. Francis, hand held out behind him to scale a ridge or a plank.

No, not for want of desire. But, even then, even at the age of fourteen, he had enough sense of self-preservation to know that his desire was not one to be bruited. Though, Christ knows, there was little enough that Fitzjames did, at the age of fourteen, to put away or school the calf’s eyes with which he probably hastened the retirement of that unfortunate tutor. The same calf’s eyes that the boy, six years on, seems to have no intention or ability to curb.

Well, Fitzjames learned [4], and so will the boy. And then the boy lifts a forkful to his mouth, and Fitzjames revises his estimation swiftly.

The boy’s jaw works as though he is digging a tunnel through a granite mountain using nothing but his teeth, as opposed to the rather less demanding load of tinned veal he is actually contending with. His lashes flutter and his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows, and an occasional light sigh escapes him, wondering and plaintive, as though he is pondering the dubious felicity of the contents of his mouth, and imagining wistfully what greater joys could be rendered unto him by quite another sort of mouthful.

Dear God, thinks Fitzjames in fascinated horror, the boy’s a lightskirt. An inept one, at that.

And then Fitzjames glances at Francis, and has to reconsider his assessment again.

It is not that Francis is looking at the boy. Fitzjames could tolerate that; could, indeed, well understand it: the boy’s an oddity, and is making a thorough-going cake of himself into the bargain. Who could blame Francis for giving the matter some attention, even some well-deserved raillery [5]? Fitzjames could endure it if Francis were looking at the boy with twitching lips and that particular inward twinkle in his lovely blue eyes. They would be gentle deserts for the boy, and might teach him to mend.

But Francis is not looking at the boy. He is, instead, staring straight down at his own plate, vermilion to the tips of his ears. Fitzjames knows, he knows for certain that that sanguinary blush has spread far below the line of his collar, down to his shoulders and quite possibly the broad chest that Fitzjames can only guess at beneath the buttons of his coat. Sigh the boy never so wistfully, swallow he never so wisely, Francis refuses to look up. But Fitzjames, watching the muscle leap at the corner of his jaw every time the boy fidgets, knows that not a single one of those sounds is lost on him.

Well, he thinks, with acid distinctness, well, well.

At length, he clears his throat and suggests they leave. The boy plays off every wile he can think of to stay a little longer. He pleads a failing memory. He asks, ingenuously, questions about routes and tacks so childish that Fitzjames thinks, again, of his Latin grammar [6]. When Fitzjames instructs Francis not to insult the boy’s intelligence by answering him, he receives a glare nicely blending abashment, defiance and a curious gratitude.

Finally he asks Francis, leaning forward in his seat: ‘Is there anything else that you can instruct me in, Captain?’

And the little vixen rests a long finger on his bottom lip, and nibbles.

Francis clears his throat and raps on the table with his knuckles. ‘I’ll call a gig for you, then,’ he says, and leaves swiftly.

Fitzjames is almost – almost – impressed when the boy holds out his scarf to Francis and asks him to check the drape of it. ‘I made a pretty good hand of it, I think,’ he says, ‘but if I could make bold with your experience, Captain.’

Fitzjames steps forward swiftly. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘allow me.’

He pulls the scarf tightly about the boy’s neck – tightly enough for the boy to gasp and for his lashes to flutter onto his reddening cheeks. Of course, thinks Fitzjames, I ought to have remembered that.

The boy’s eyes drag open, and the look he fixes on Fitzjames is arrested, his eyes glowing with a light both mortified and knowing.

Fitzjames pulls the scarf up, the backs of his fingers grazing the boy’s mouth. He swallows and steps away quickly. ‘You’ll do,’ he tells him, and turns to pull on his gloves, feeling both Francis’s and the boy’s eyes on him.

The boy is silent on the ride over, and during their dinner. He seems to be turning over the day’s events in his head, and appears well-enough satisfied with his cogitations. Fitzjames, for his part, is blue-devilled, and tries manfully to pretend that he does not know the cause.

The boy and he dress for bed in silence, backs turned decorously on each other for all the world as though they are duelling and preparing to measure the length of twelve paces.

He gets into bed in silence. Presently, the mattress dips as the boy gets in as well.

‘Would you like to read before you sleep?’ he asks, not looking at the boy. When he receives no response, he turns and finds the boy staring at him from rather closer than he had thought.

‘You have a grey hair,’ says the boy.

Fitzjames sets his teeth. ‘I have two,’ he says, and tries to affect the smugness of the man of property. From the boy’s quick satisfied smile, he does not think he succeeds.

‘May I see?’

‘You may not,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I do not even know where the second is, I only know about it because F – because I was told.’

The boy slides closer still. The candlelight casts a golden flickering shadow on his long face.

‘You never told me,’ says the boy, ‘what happened in the years between twenty and five-and-thirty.’

Fitzjames’s eyes are on the boy’s. ‘You never asked me.’

The boy says nothing, raising a hand so that his fingers hover over the place by Fitzjames’s temple where sprouts that grey hair, that accursed grey hair.

Fitzjames reaches up and grasps the boy’s wrist. He feels the boy’s blood beat beneath his fingers and thumb, hot and vital and impetuous, like the boy himself. The boy, slender and warm and headlong, all angles and mouth and eyes like snapping coal in his face, darting between Fitzjames’s own eyes and his lips.

He presses down with his thumb and feels the hectic leap of the boy’s pulse beneath. He watches the boy’s lips part and the fluttering shadows of his eyelashes on his high thin cheek.

Fitzjames drops the boy’s wrist. ‘Good night,’ he says. He does not recognise his own voice.

The boy moistens his lips, a quick movement. He nods and lies down, back turned to Fitzjames.

Fitzjames comes to the surface later that night with his nose twitching. On blinking blearily, he finds that he is wrapped snugly abaft the boy, arm about his thin waist and nose pressed firmly into his hair. The boy snuffles, moving into the heat of Fitzjames’s body with a determined backwards ripple of his hips. Fitzjames is weary enough, or reduced enough, or emboldened enough, to let his eyes fall shut and relax against his pillow (now shared with the interloper) until his better angels prod him awake. He pulls away, making as little disturbance as he can. The boy stirs at the movement, but settles again.

Some hours later, he feels a heavy, and already familiar, weight on his chest. The boy has wedged his head firmly beneath his chin and a bony knee is between Fitzjames’s legs, lodged directly beneath his prick, stiffening shamefully with every minute shift as the boy finds a resting place. He’s warm, Christ, but he’s warm. Fitzjames did not think to ever feel warm again.

Again, he feels his eyes shutting. Again, he feels the heaviness of his arms. Again, he grinds his teeth and rolls the boy onto his back, watching the hazy discontent on his sleeping face. Fitzjames turns away, arms folded firmly across his chest, and tells himself that he had better stay awake if he is so to betray himself at the mere proximity of warm flesh.

At some point or other, though, he does fall back to sleep, because it is morning when his eyes blink open again.

He looks over to wake the boy, and finds himself alone in bed. He sits up and calls, cautiously: ‘James?’ When he receives no response, he gets out of bed and looks about his cabin. Even for a man of his standing and – until recently – status as a convalescent can only be afforded so much space, and Fitzjames acknowledges speedily that if the boy is not anywhere visible in Fitzjames’s quarters, it is because he is not there.

For a moment Fitzjames wonders if the boy disappeared simply as he appeared: with no fanfare and no explanation. He cannot quite say why he immediately rejects this explanation. He knows, in his bones, that the boy is about, though at present he does not know where.

After his second abortive search of his cabin, he gets dressed. Francis might be able to suggest a plan of attack that does not reveal itself to Fitzjames, and even if he cannot Fitzjames is not above wishing to share this intelligence with the only other person who would understand. Fitzjames has experienced the abrupt and disquieting loss of an unsolicited and no less disquieting acquisition, and he cannot name the half of his sentiments on the matter.

When he ventures down to bespeak himself a gig, he is met with puzzlement.

‘We thought you had gone across already, Captain,’ the man says. At Fitzjames’s blank look he continues ‘earlier today.’

Well, he thinks to himself, the boy doesn’t lack for enterprise, there is that much to be said for him.

‘Oh?’ says Fitzjames carefully, ‘I have been running quite tame on the Investigator, I am afraid.’

He offers no other explanation, and is not pressed for one. He keeps up a steady stream of conversation as he is rowed over, and pulls down his scarf long enough to throw his most charming of smiles in thanks over his shoulder as he climbs up on deck.

He says that his errand is with Captain Crozier, and sets off for his cabin with swift and determined step without waiting to be announced.

The cabin itself is empty, though there are two chairs which look to have been recently occupied, and somewhat hastily vacated. The door to Francis’s berth is ajar, however, and there appears to be movement beyond it.

Fitzjames steps to the door and pushes it open.

Inside is Francis, seated on the bed. One large hand is sliding up the back of the boy, straddling his lap, and the other is in his hair. The boy is rocking his hips against Francis, letting out soft pleading sighs.

Fitzjames makes some sort of sound, he supposes, for their movements abruptly still. The boy’s head snaps around. His eyes burn into those of Fitzjames, and his chin comes up. Fitzjames reaches for the lightest smile that he can contrive before his eyes meet Francis’s, shocked-open and dark.

He says instead ‘You ought to lock the door,’ and turns on his heel. He reaches the threshold before a familiar hand, rough and urgent, snatches at his wrist. He pulls away blindly and the hand tightens, the other coming up to grasp his shoulder.

‘James. James.’

Fitzjames thinks, for a moment, of shaking Francis off before he considers the indignity of tussling with Francis in full sight of the boy. He slumps in Francis’s grasp and suffers himself to be turned around, but keeps his head turned away.

‘James,’ says Francis. His voice is scraped-open, a rough plea that Fitzjames remembers well from other conversations. ‘James, look at me.’

Fitzjames keeps his head turned. It is important, he thinks – very important – that he does not look at either Francis, or the boy. Childish, he knows, but why stand on points now. The boy has taught him clearly enough the uses of dignity.

‘James.’ The voice is gentler, which Fitzjames thinks is monstrously unfair. He has suspected Francis, before, of deploying a particular open-palmed fragility the way a general uses a highly specialised siege weapon, to bend the most truculent or wavering of subordinates to his will. I never thought to see it used it on me, he thinks bitterly.

‘Very well, then,’ the voice continues, low and profoundly sad. ‘I know I do not deserve it. But – James, it’s my want of conduct that you should punish. Don’t – it’s not the boy you’re angry with.’

‘The boy?’ says Fitzjames. He’s looking at Francis now – oh, an error, an error, a crass error, he will regret this grievously – but he could not prevent himself if he slapped steel hoops over his eyes. ‘The boy?’

‘James - ’

‘Your thought is for the boy?’

‘James - ’

‘Which James?’

Francis flinches, and Fitzjames records it and promises himself that he will remember this and extract every possible crumb of satisfaction from the movement at his leisure. ‘No, I suppose that was unnecessary. You can tell the difference between us perfectly well, as is plain to see.’

‘Christ, James - ’

‘Which is why, one presumes, the one contended with unabated scorn, the occasional blow and the glittering final reward of grudging tolerance - ’

‘James - ’

‘Whereas the other, by the all-seeing dispensation of Francis Crozier, received - ’ Fitzjames stops. ‘Clearly our deserts warrant mightily different regard.’

He is looking into the boy’s wide eyes when he feels a hand on the side of his neck. He feels his eyes shut and forces them open, furiously. Francis’s voice comes to him, slow and halting. ‘What regard would you like from me?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Francis,’ says Fitzjames, grateful for the familiar trappings of vexation, ‘don’t be missish. It doesn’t become a man of your years. Whatever ignorance you might once have had about the nature of my sentiments towards you, you cannot profess any more. He - ’ gesturing at the boy, ‘is I, and I am he. One’s appetites alter with age, but not that much.’

Come, thinks Fitzjames, looking at Francis, at long last, it is said. And – at least thus far – without even a blow to the jaw for his pains.

Francis is staring back at him, his eyes a very dark blue and his breath coming fast. He says, at length: ‘He is you, and you are he. You have the right of it.’

Fitzjames tries to shrug, but Francis’s hand tightens. He continues: ‘James, it is not the differences between the pair of you that I see, but the likeness.’

He leans forward as though he can impress the words directly into Fitzjames’s skull by sheer mechanical will and says: ‘If you wanted a man – James, if you were turned over and over with it – and you were offered – somehow you were offered – a version of him that could want you back - ’

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, ‘what are you saying?’

‘James,’ says Francis, hand coming up to cup his cheek, ‘James, Christ, words have never served me well, I’ll only set your back up - ’

‘Our history suggests that it is my words that have offended you, rather - ’

Francis’s hand moves to cover Fitzjames’s mouth. A smile is beginning to tremble at the corners of his lips. Holding his gaze, Fitzjames opens his mouth sufficient to draw the tip of one thick finger into it. Francis draws in a sharp breath.

‘James,’ he says, ‘please - ’

Fitzjames kisses him, a graceless thing, landing in its eagerness nearer to Francis’s chin than his mouth. Francis grunts a little in surprise, and then his hand is moving to seize Fitzjames’s hair and pull his head up enough that their mouths can find each other.

They do not, still, quite manage a kiss. They sigh into each other’s mouths, a soft sound of infinite relief. Fitzjames sags against Francis, whose arm comes up around his waist.

‘James,’ says Francis, a wondering sound swallowed into Fitzjames’s mouth. Fitzjames hums in answer, tasting the vibration against Francis’s skin.

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, ‘may I kiss you?’

He waits to feel Francis’s nod before he presses a kiss to his lips. Chaste, still, and gentle. He wishes, briefly, that he had observed the boy and Francis at play before he had made his presence known. Long enough, at least, to determine what Francis likes. He is acutely conscious that he has a threshold to make up.

He sips at Francis’s lips and drinks Francis’s sighs, until the hand on the back of his neck tightens enough to pull him in. He opens his mouth enough against Francis’s for his tongue to lap lightly at his lower lip and is rewarded with a groan. Francis’s mouth opens and he sucks on Fitzjames’s tongue, a movement so hasty and greedy that Fitzjames wonders with immediate heat how those lips would feel around his prick.

His hips push forward and Francis yanks him closer still. ‘James,’ he pants against Fitzjames’s cheek, ‘James, I’ll not impel you, man, I’m only - ’

Fitzjames makes an impatient noise in his throat and dives for Francis’s mouth again. He pulls at Francis’s bottom lip, he whines when Francis breaks away to gasp against his jaw, he sighs when Francis presses kiss upon hot kiss to his cheekbones, the ridge of his brow, the corner of his mouth. His hands move down to take purposeful grip of Francis’s arse and squeeze. Francis grunts against the line of his jaw, a shocked sound, and sucks at the soft skin beneath.

The sound of a throat being very pointedly cleared has Fitzjames lifting his head, the soft noise of their lips parting making him groan. The two of them turn – not without reluctance – towards the source of the noise.

The boy is sitting up on Francis’s bed. His cravat is missing, abandoned to parts unknown. His borrowed shirt has been unbuttoned partially, by Francis’s offices or his own. The gleam of his collarbone calls vehement attention to itself, as does the tumbled mane of his hair.

‘I must suppose,’ he says, with his chin up, ‘that you wish me to go.’

He is making a valiant effort at nonchalance, but Fitzjames can see the line of his shoulders and he knows the boy is moments away from bolting. The eyes that he turns on the two of them burn with a reproach and a hunger that has Fitzjames reaching out for him before he knows what he is doing.

Francis disentangles himself from Fitzjames with a parting squeeze of the hand about his waist, and goes to the bed. ‘James,’ he says, sitting down, ‘I did not wish to hurt you.’

The boy turns his head away in a swift sharp motion that Fitzjames recognises. So, it appears, does Francis, if the rueful smile he throws at Fitzjames over his shoulder is any indication.

‘Lamb,’ he says, and reaches up to cup the boy’s jaw. One thumb moves, gently, over his thin cheek. The boy shudders and leans into the touch, long lashes drifting slowly up. He looks at Francis and Francis takes in a long breath. He turns away again, tilting his head back on its long pale throat to stare at Fitzjames.

Fitzjames walks forward, not entirely impelled by conscious intention, until he is at the boy’s feet. The boy has curved his head down so that he is nuzzling Francis’s hand. His eyes slant up at Fitzjames as he approaches, dark and heavy-lidded. Fitzjames reaches up slowly. He thinks at first to clasp the boy’s shoulder, to hold him and earth him. And so, at first, he does. And then, when the weight of the inadequacy of the gesture threatens to crush the breath out of him, he raises his hand to stroke the boy’s hair. He pushes it away from his long gleaming throat and then finds his fingers caught in the hollows and shadows of that downturned face as a cat’s claws snag in silk. He trails the back of his hand against the smooth slope of the boy’s cheek down to that dagger-sharp chin, further down to tangle with Francis’s wrist as he cradles the boy’s face. Francis draws in breath quickly at the touch, and Fitzjames can feel him still as he rubs his knuckles over the boy’s chin and the fine blue vein on the inside of Francis’s wrist. Once, again, and then back up. He grazes the boy’s lower lip as he ascends, and finds himself sucking in his own quick breath.

Something too much of this, he thinks; he is here to offer comfort, should the boy wish to receive it. What manner of comfort the boy would accept is open to conjecture, and Fitzjames’s conjectures are born of night-time embraces and a malleable, sleeping form. This long-limbed, long-lashed creature wearing his face wants one thing Fitzjames wants, but he cannot answer for –

There is a hand on his thigh. Careful, but hot and determined and inching unmistakeably higher and higher. Fitzjames’s eyes dart to the boy’s, which are determinedly lowered.

You little minx, thinks Fitzjames, to try that with me – me!

He strokes the corner of the boy’s mouth, swallowing as he opens enough for his finger to slip inside. The boy’s lower lip is bitten red and wet, the mouth of a tropical flower that promises the most honeyed of deaths to any creature that tries it.

‘He wants you,’ says Francis. His voice has a slurring rasp, as though he is trying to navigate a maze after the best of a decanter of whisky. Drunk, but wonderingly, joyously so. ‘He wants you, James. Can you blame him?’

‘Whom are you speaking to?’ says Fitzjames, watching his finger slide into a hot wet waiting mouth. The boy’s cheeks hollow as he suckles, greedy and unsubtle. He looks up, once, at Fitzjames, and then sidelong at Francis as he sucks harder, managing a long slow smile at Francis’s groan.

‘Francis?’ says Fitzjames again, and swallows at the sound of his own voice. ‘Francis, whom were you speaking to?’

Francis leans his forehead against the boy’s thin shoulder and looks up at Fitzjames. His face is flushed and his eyes at half-mast. A crooked smile is forming on his lips – a leer, on any other man [7]. ‘It doesn’t matter, now, does it?’

Fitzjames looks into Francis’s eyes and shakes his head.

The boy’s teeth scrape at the pad of Fitzjames’s finger at the same time that his hand comes to rest at the juncture of Fitzjames’s thigh and fundament. His fingers tighten slowly until his nails dig into the flesh. Fitzjames hisses in a breath and twitches. The boy’s eyes glint beneath his lashes.

Fitzjames moves his hand to the back of the boy’s neck. He grabs a handful of hair and pulls his head back, hard enough that the boy lets out a wounded cry, as though a cherished decency has been outraged.

‘You’re hurting him,’ says Francis’s voice sharply.

‘I am,’ agrees Fitzjames. ‘He likes it.’

The boy stares up at Fitzjames, mouth still firmly clamped on his finger. His lashes are fluttering over huge eyes.

‘James,’ says Francis’s voice again.

‘Touch him,’ says Fitzjames. He does not take his eyes away from the boy’s. He hears his muffled gasp as Francis grabs his prick over his trousers, sees the gleam in the dark eyes lifted to his, watches the lids draw close as he rocks into Francis’s grasp.

‘You lying little whelp,’ says Francis’s voice.

The boy lets Fitzjames’s finger go with a wet pop. ‘He was hurting me,’ he says, eyes wide and indignant, and yelps as Francis seizes him. Fitzjames watches those rough square fingers tangle into the gleaming dark hair with teeth-bared envy. Another threshold.

‘He hurt you, did he, puppy?’ says Francis, ‘Too much, or not enough?’

The boy’s mouth is wide open, a round wet O. Francis grins down at him and bends his head over the white throat bared to him. When his teeth sink in, the boy cries out, a helpless wondering thing, hips pushing up against Francis’s weight. The hand still on Fitzjames’s arse pulls insistently so that Fitzjames falls forward, an ungainly tangle of limbs with the boy’s and those of Francis. He extricates himself sufficiently to sit up, pulling the boy against his chest with Francis still attached to his neck. He claps a hand over the boy’s mouth to stifle the sound – the boy’s crying out like a roundshot – and he sucks two fingers into his mouth with an impatient motion.

Fitzjames groans himself, sound buried in the boy’s hair, as Francis tongues at the rise of his Adam’s apple and the boy sucks furiously at Fitzjames’s fingers and squirms against his fattening yard.

‘Easy now, easy,’ says Francis, lifting his head, ‘you’ll hurt yourself, thrashing about like that.’

The boy tosses his head, managing to sound impatient even around the mouthful he refuses to relinquish.

‘Still, now,’ says Francis, hands slapping down on the boy’s thighs. The boy jumps and Francis’s hands tighten. The boy shivers against Fitzjames’s chest and goes limp.

‘Good lad,’ says Francis softly and Fitzjames can see the boy’s lashes flutter. ‘Feed him another one, James.’

Fitzjames licks his lips and rests a third finger against the boy’s mouth. Instantly he opens up and nibbles at it, drawing it in.

‘Give him more,’ says Francis. His voice is rough and his eyes are intent on the boy’s mouth.

Fitzjames obliges, pushing his fingers further into the boy’s mouth until he can feel the jerk of his palate. The boy gasps wetly, letting out an urgent bubbling sound. But when Fitzjames makes to withdraw, he does not need Francis’s fingers at his wrist to arrest the motion: the boy clamps down fiercely with his teeth.

‘There, lamb,’ says Francis, ‘nobody’s taking it away from you.’ He strokes at the corner of the boy’s lips and lifts his thumb to Fitzjames’s mouth, wet with the boy’s spit. Fitzjames suckles at it hungrily, feeling the movements of his throat pick up to match the boy’s, or the boy’s to his.

‘God,’ says Francis. Fitzjames’s eyes open to look into his. ‘Christ, the pair of you.’ He shuffles closer.

The boy grinds down against Fitzjames’s prick and he gasps, letting fall Francis’s thumb. Francis strokes Fitzjames’s cheek, a quick wet swipe, before looking down at the boy.

‘Look at you,’ he says, ‘is it feeding you’re wanting, lad?’

The boy nods around Fitzjames’s fingers before lurching forward, Fitzjames’s fingers trailing down his chin. His own long fingers grope at Francis’s waist and then rub urgently over his yard. Francis groans, eyes shutting for a moment before his fingers close over the boy’s wrist.

‘James,’ he says, ‘James – Christ, stop – are you certain, James?’

Fitzjames is about to ask, in all sincerity and with not a little waspishness, which James Francis means, when the boy takes the matter out of his hands. He wriggles out of Fitzjames’s grasp and throws him a glinting, triumphant look over his shoulder before slithering off the bed and tugging insistently at Francis’s legs. When Francis hesitates, he clicks his tongue and drags him bodily to the edge of the bed. Then he unbuttons Francis with shaking fingers and draws him out of his trousers and drawers.

Francis shivers and Fitzjames starts forward, but the boy raises his chin and says ‘I am to learn, you said.’ And where would Fitzjames be without an outstretched arm, without overreach and a hungry mouth? So Fitzjames sits back on his heels and watches as the boy gains another threshold.

Francis’s prick is stocky, fattening beautifully before Fitzjames’s avid gaze, and red: Francis’s own lovely blush, bashful and choleric at once. When Fitzjames sees the tip disappear into the boy’s waiting mouth, he feels his own begin to water. He sways forward, so eager he nearly shakes off the staying hand on his arm. It is only when the hand moves to cup his jaw that he suffers his head to be turned towards Francis, eyes intent on him.

Francis pulls Fitzjames’s head towards his, leaving Fitzjames kneeling, pressed up against his back. His fingers grasp Fitzjames’s chin firmly, and he surges up to kiss him. Fitzjames licks eagerly into his mouth, moans as Francis grasps his thigh, kneads at the skin covered by Francis’s waistcoat.

Francis pulls away to pant against the corner of Fitzjames’s mouth. Fitzjames looks blearily down at the boy, long hands resting on Francis’s thighs, lashes fluttering on his cheek as he pulls away to suck in breath before diving back, all determination and spittle and wet sucking sounds. He reaches down enough to draw a finger down his cheek and watches the boy shiver. Then, when Francis bites at the side of his jaw, Fitzjames turns back. He meets Francis’s raised eyebrow with a hum and fits his mouth over his. He sucks on Francis’s tongue, an eager greedy movement that he hazily realises matches in rhythm the unpractised movements of the boy doting on Francis’s yard.

There is a choking sound at the foot of the bed. Francis pulls away from Fitzjames sharply and looks down at the boy. ‘James,’ he says, ‘lad, are you all right?’

The boy nods furiously, lips wrapped around Francis’s prick. His fingers are digging into the flesh of Francis’s thighs. His lashes are wet with tears and spittle is running down his cheeks and chin. He is staring up at the pair of them and even around his mouthful Fitzjames can see the mutinous set of his jaw.

Francis lets out a deep, long sigh. ‘Always in such a hurry,’ he says, and once again Fitzjames feels as though he’s eavesdropping.

‘He’s hungry,’ says Fitzjames, feeling an impulse – obscure but acute – to defend the boy.

‘That he is,’ says Francis. He moves the hand on Fitzjames’s thigh to the back of the boy’s head and slams his hips forward. The boy rocks back, choking wetly. Francis’s other hand swipes at the mess pooling at the corner of the boy’s mouth and lifts it up to Fitzjames’s lips. Fitzjames bends and swallows and Francis lets out a sound in equal parts groan and sigh.

‘You’ve nothing to prove, lad,’ he says, and takes a firmer hold of the boy’s hair. ‘Ease up, now.’

The boy frowns and Francis raises an eyebrow. ‘Mr Fitzjames,’ he says, ‘ease up.’

The boy shivers and slumps. ‘Good boy,’ says Francis and withdraws slightly, with the soft wet sound of the boy’s mouth reluctantly relinquishing its cargo.

‘You’re allowed to enjoy it too, you know,’ says Francis, and rocks forward into the boy’s mouth. The boy leans forward and Francis’s hand tightens swiftly in his hair. ‘None of that,’ he says. ‘You’ll learn not to snatch before you’re ready.’

‘What if,’ says Fitzjames in Francis’s ear, ‘he is ready betimes, Francis? What if he knows he is ready but is not believed?’

Francis’s other hand, wet with the boy’s spit, slides roughly into Fitzjames’s hair. ‘I ought to have known,’ he said. ‘Do you think he’s ready, then, James?’

Fitzjames’s eyes slide down to the boy, thrumming with a nervous expectancy, and he feels his lips curl upwards. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no, he is not.’

The boy quivers, and the look he shoots Fitzjames has him reach down to brush his fingers across the boy’s cheek.

‘Too hasty,’ says Francis, ‘look at you, snatching and gobbling like St Giles flotsam. Here,’ and he moves his hand from the boy’s hair to his throat, ‘relax, now.’

Fitzjames watches the movement of that strong square hand down the boy’s neck, bared to his attention, and swallows. He thinks of the flap of a tent, of a quickly-calcifying red mist over one eye. He thinks of Bridgens’s kindly voice in the gloom, of a final departing kiss to his hand, of Francis, intent and despairing and lit from within, cupping his jaw and proffering a final and longed-for charity.

Fitzjames lowers his head to Francis’s shoulders and squeezes his eyes shut.

‘James,’ he hears Francis say, ‘James, look at me.’

He obeys and finds Francis’s eyes on him, brimming and knowing. Fitzjames kisses Francis once, and when he lifts his head he has left the glistening trail of his own tears on Francis’s cheek.

Francis is smiling at him as they part, and Fitzjames looks down to the sure movement of his hand on the boy’s throat. He reaches out his own hand and rests his fingers atop those of Francis.

‘Gently, now,’ Francis is saying, ‘gently, and you can have some more.’

He pushes forward again, with a rich wet sound. Fitzjames hears the boy’s breath halting and moves his own fingers down to the column of his throat. He feels the boy ease, feels the outline of Francis’s prick.

‘Like that,’ he hears Francis say, ‘I’m there now, lad, you’ve taken it, you’ve taken me. And now - ’

Francis pulls back, just a little, enough for a muffled whine to escape the boy’s throat and for Francis to flick him a minatory eyebrow. And then he moves, with easy rocks of his hips at first and then quick snaps, one hand to the back of the boy’s head to hold him in place, and the other on Fitzjames’s thigh to give himself purchase. The boy clutches Francis, gazing up at him with streaming eyes and a chin dripping with spit. There is a fierce bloom high on his cheek and Fitzjames thinks with a helpless pang that he too may once have been beautiful.

Francis’s hair is sticking to his forehead and the drive of his hips is more urgent. ‘James,’ he says on a pained rasp, and the boy’s hands tighten on his thighs. Francis spends and groans in duet with the boy’s own bubbling, exultant cry, spit and seed running down his cheeks and chin.

Francis slumps, panting, and reaches for Fitzjames, who cannot tear his eyes from the sticky shining trail on the boy’s face. He disentangles himself from Francis and crawls to the edge of the bed.

The boy has pulled out his own prick, stiff and red, from his trousers, and is frigging himself frantically.

‘No,’ says Fitzjames, hand squeezing the boy’s wrist. The boy looks up at Fitzjames, but nods. Fitzjames grasps the boy’s shoulder and urges him up onto the bunk until he is straddling Fitzjames. He holds the boy’s chin and brings his face closer, licking and nuzzling at the boy’s lips until he opens to him. He sweeps his tongue in, flushing out every atom of Francis’s offering coating the boy’s tongue and the inside of his mouth. He pulls away and licks a luxuriant drag up the point of the boy’s chin and his thin cheeks, muscles fluttering under his tongue.

The boy is rocking against Fitzjames’s own yard, trapped and stiff in his trousers. He is letting out a caged, desperate keen, which Fitzjames catches in his mouth before he gropes for the boy’s prick:  hard and hot and slippery with his own need. Fitzjames hums into the boy’s mouth as he gets a good grip. The boy’s hands fly up to Fitzjames’s upper arms and he holds on, tightly enough that Fitzjames can feel it through the coat he has yet to take off. He sucks at Fitzjames’s tongue and trembles as Fitzjames moves his hand, feeling the boy’s tremors and his mewls before he utters them.

The boy leaks and shakes in Fitzjames’s arms, turns rigid as he spends, and then collapses against his chest as though he has been most impolitely murdered. Fitzjames brushes his hair out of his eyes and brings up his hand, dripping with the boy’s seed. He licks the boy off his hand thoroughly, and is about to kiss him back into his own mouth, when he feels a hand on his arm.

He is pulled back roughly against Francis, kissed hard, and then shoved back onto the bed.

‘I thought for a moment you’d join the puppy on the floor,’ says Francis, ‘no consideration for an old man’s knees.’ He is undoing Fitzjames’s trousers with quick rough movements, pulling him out into the cool of the berth. He frigs Fitzjames with deft brisk rolls of his wrist, collecting the clear stuff at the head and coating his prick with it. Fitzjames jolts up into his grasp with a cry and Francis slaps the other hand over his mouth.

‘You’ll be quiet, now,’ he says, and Fitzjames nods shakily. Francis cocks an eyebrow at him before lifting his hand and crouching down. When his lips close over Fitzjames’s yard it is all he can do to not buck into the generous heat of it. Francis pins his hips down with a thick forearm in any case. Fitzjames pushes up, only to feel the weight of his arm press him firmly down, and throws back his head on a long gasping sigh.

Francis sucks at him patiently, methodically, a man who knows what he is about and expects to be attended to. He allows Fitzjames’s hips to roll, but holds him down when he threatens to drive harder than Francis intends. When Fitzjames cannot forbear a cry Francis pulls off with a pop and rests his chin on the arm across his hips, working him with an exacting motion until Fitzjames seizes and spills over his fist. His hand continues until Fitzjames bats feebly at him, whimpering for leniency towards his softening prick. Francis gives him a quick wild grin but – at length – sits up, lifting his hand. He turns his head towards the boy and extends his arm. The boy scrambles over, wrapping his fingers around Francis’s wrist and lowering his tongue to his palm.

Francis hauls Fitzjames up and Fitzjames kisses him, licks the taste of himself from Francis’s mouth as the boy nuzzles and plies his tongue until Francis’s palm is dripping again.

When their lips part, Fitzjames lowers his head to Francis’s shoulder. The boy subsides against his chest, and they sit, slowly, listening as their breaths settle and slow.

‘We should rest,’ says Francis, at length. Fitzjames turns his head to look at the movement of his jaw. He feels disinclined to the burden of a decision.

‘Stay,’ says Francis: quiet, of a sudden, a little uncertain. ‘Stay here with me. Sleep awhile.’

Fitzjames feels the boy nod, immediately and fervently, against Francis’s chest. ‘James?’ says Francis, and Fitzjames hums in agreement. He feels Francis smile against the top of his head and then hears a brisk ‘good’.

Fitzjames disentangles himself from Francis and sits up. He unlaces his boots and works them off. Then he doffs his coat and bestirs himself enough to fold it upon a chair. He has been alarming his steward entirely enough as it is these past two days, he reasons. His peter he tucks back into his trousers, and then judges that he has done sufficient.

The boy, to Fitzjames’s utter lack of surprise, goes rather further. He unbuttons his shirt and pulls it off, then his trousers, then his drawers. His movements have a dreamy slowness, a languor that seems entirely internal until Fitzjames spies the swift look cast at him and Francis beneath the boy’s lashes. The gleaming pallor of his skin, the curve of his long back as he bends to retrieve his trousers from the floor, the narrow curve of his little arse, all are offered up for their perusal, as are the soft sighs with which he divests himself, or the arch of his throat, or the shadow of his lashes on his cheek as he looks over his shoulder.

‘Good Christ,’ says Francis, ‘and I thought you were enough to endure.’

Fitzjames sniffs. ‘You’re enduring him well enough,’ he says, and does not try overmuch to contain his asperity.

Francis reaches across and takes a lock of his hair between his fingers. ‘A man can only take so much,’ he says, ‘before he must admit when he is beaten.’

Fitzjames casts his eyes heavenwards, and the hand in his hair tightens. ‘By the time the puppy came to us,’ says Francis, ‘My back was well and truly broken. There was no fight left in me. You saw to that.’

Fitzjames turns his head to look at Francis and surges forward to kiss him. The boy comes to the bed and clambers in between Francis and Fitzjames. He squirms until he has his arse cradled in Francis’s hips, his legs tangled with Fitzjames’s, and the lion’s share of the pillow, before he sighs and let his eyes fall shut.

Francis looks down at the boy with a grin before reaching across him to touch Fitzjames’s face briefly. ‘Rest now,’ he says, and Fitzjames’s eyes shut.

He awakens, some time later, to the sound of low voices.

‘James, what are - ’

The sound of a kiss, a darting thing. Another. Then another. Then a sigh as the kiss turns into something deliberate and thorough.

James peeps across, taking care to keep his breath even. The boy is on top of Francis, wriggling against his body. His skin glows in the half-dark and his angular, undulating body is alien to Fitzjames, singular and terrifying in its familiarity.

‘I’m ready,’ says the boy, his voice rising a little.

‘Sshhhh, you’ll wake James.’

The boy glances across. ‘He’s awake,’ he declares, ‘he’s only shamming. And besides,’ a pause and a quiet, choked-off groan from Francis, ‘I want him to see.’

‘See what?’ says Fitzjames. The boy gives him a quick smile and reaches across to run a hand down his chest.

‘You said I was to learn,’ says the boy, ‘I want the Captain to show me.’

‘Show you what?’ says Fitzjames.

The boy’s hand curls into the front of Fitzjames’s shirt and he is pulled forward enough for him to whisper in his ear ‘show me what he likes.’

Fitzjames stares up at the boy and then at Francis. Francis who is looking up at him with a welter of emotions in his eye. ‘It’s the very broth of a boy, the puppy, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ says Fitzjames. Yes, I used to be. And Christ, to have it be rewarded so!

‘Well,’ says Francis, ‘learn you shall.’ His hands slam around the boy’s narrow hips and he is lifted bodily and tumbled onto his back.

‘If it’s schooling you’re wanting, boyo,’ says Francis, ‘it’s schooling you shall receive.’ He sits up and reaches for Fitzjames, hauling him up. ‘But I need instruction myself.’ He walks on his knees towards Fitzjames until he is between the boy’s legs.

‘Am I to instruct you?’ says Fitzjames. Francis grins, quickly. ‘You’re the only man who can.’ He looks at Fitzjames’s cravat. ‘I want this off you,’ he says. Fitzjames smiles and reaches up. He undoes the knot with care, unravelling it with enough deliberation to make Francis’s lips tighten. When the muslin is loose around his neck Francis reaches forward and pulls it off with an abrupt motion, making Fitzjames lick his lips.

‘This too, now,’ says Francis, plucking at the stuff of Fitzjames’s shirt.

Fitzjames unbuttons the shirt slowly, eyes on Francis as he does it. Francis is watching the movement of his fingers with a vexed intensity.

‘This mummery,’ he says at length on a growl, ‘for whose benefit is it?’

Fitzjames makes no response, easing his shirt off one shoulder. Francis is on him, tugging the shirt off the other, untucking it and flinging it away from him with an impatient movement.

‘If you have damaged it,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I shall demand restitution.’

‘If I have damaged it,’ says Francis, ‘you have only yourself to blame.’

Fitzjames raises his chin with some hauteur, but then Francis reaches out the tips of his fingers to brush the hollow at the bottom of his throat, and he swallows.

Francis follows the rise of his collarbone, first with his fingers, then with his lips. He rubs his cheek against the side of Fitzjames’s throat before opening his mouth over the place where his neck meets his shoulders. He licks over it before sucking. Fitzjames’s fingers find their way into the short hair at the base of Francis’s neck and he holds him in place, urging him to press harder, with fingers and then teeth. Francis obliges and Fitzjames gasps, fingers tightening in Francis’s hair. Again, and Fitzjames gasps again.

‘Francis,’ he says, rolling his cheek against the back of Francis’s head, ‘Francis.’

Francis’s hand comes up and pulls Fitzjames’s head back, disposing of him as he sucks and bites his way around to the other side of his throat. Fitzjames thinks of the livid welts he will carry under his cravat [8] and sighs. Francis lifts his head once to kiss him, open-mouthed and hungry, before descending to lick and suck at the knob where his collarbone juts from his shoulder.

It is only when Francis sits back on his heels to run hot eyes over his handiwork that Fitzjames first feels the cool of the air on his skin. The boy is sitting up with intent dark eyes. He is smooth and unscarred and palely glowing and Fitzjames finds himself flushing. The last time he contemplated his own body in any detail his viscera were pushing themselves out, headlong and eager for attention, clamouring for their turn at last, at long last. The map has been crumpled and stitched together again, but he has seams now and they cannot but show.

The touch of a rough thumb on his chest makes him jolt.

‘Single musket ball,’ says Francis, quietly, ‘size of a cherry.’

He is examining the pink raised skin over the scar intently. ‘Zhenjiang,’ he says, turning his head to address the boy, ‘you stormed a fortification in its capture. A sniper nearly did for you twice with a single bullet.’ The boy crawls over, hot eye running over Fitzjames’s chest.

‘Through your arm first,’ says Francis, ‘show me now.’

Fitzjames raises his arm and shows Francis the faint silvery scorch-mark the bullet had left. ‘I didn’t think you remembered.’

Francis grins at him. ‘You tell the tale so often I remember it better than I remember the names of my nieces.’

Fitzjames sniffs, expelling his breath on a rush when Francis lowers his head over his chest to run his tongue over the scar. He gasps when Francis scrapes his teeth over the region, once lightly, then biting down.

‘This one?’ says Francis, thumbing over a faint diagonal emerging from his hip. The touch is curious and familiar at once, as though Francis is running his hand over a greyhound or a foal that he intends to purchase. Fitzjames takes his lip between his teeth.

‘From my time on the Ganges,’ he says, ‘I was delivering a proclamation to the Egyptian camp. A bayonet caught in my coat.’

Francis lifts his eyebrow. ‘What kind of proclamation?’

‘I can scarcely remember now,’ says Fitzjames. ‘Their general put a price on my head for my pains.’

‘Do you remember the price?’

‘Oh, well,’ says Fitzjames, ‘it was some years ago.’

‘He remembers,’ says Francis to the boy, and bites down hard at the nape of Fitzjames’s neck. Fitzjames cries out, hand rising up to hold Francis’s head in place.

‘It was – ah! – a f – flattering price.’

Francis sucks at the bite and rubs his knuckles hard over the scar, once, twice. ‘Flattering,’ he says to the boy, moving the heel of his palm over Fitzjames’s prick, ‘Christ, the things you’ll do for flattery.’

‘It wasn’t only – F-Francis, I – oh, God, it wasn’t only - ’

‘How deep did the bayonet go?’ says Francis. There’s a roil in his voice. ‘how many times did it nearly take you?’

‘Once,’ says Fitzjames.

‘Only once,’ says Francis. ‘Small wonder you prefer the other story.’

Fitzjames would sniff again, except that Francis is now moving his hand with excruciating deliberation over his prick.

‘Show him the others,’ he says, looking at Fitzjames. Mutely, he raises his hand and shows them the scar he got from the ropes biting into his palm when he hauled. He shows them the long scrape from an unforgiving ridge. He shows them the scorch mark from the rocket loosed off at the Tuunbaq.

The boy shuffles over, eyes bottomless and gleaming. Francis marks the scars with a brusque finger and pulls the boy’s head closer. The boy passes his tongue over his lips as he looks, intent and greedy. His fingers replace Francis’s: longer, with the familiar roughness of their shared profession. He turns Fitzjames’s hand over with a febrile snapping hunger. Fitzjames sways on his knees, eyes fluttering shut at the boy’s breath on his skin and Francis’s hand working him steadily. A curiosity, he thinks, and swallows. A fly in amber, an object in an exhibition with not even the scant protection of a pane of glass.

The boy’s mouth fastens over his wrist and Fitzjames jolts. The boy’s eyes are on him, rapt and watchful. He tongues at Fitzjames’s scar and, as Fitzjames looks at him, lets his teeth close on the raised skin. He worries the flesh between his teeth and sucks as though he can lift the hurt off and swallow it.

‘You needn’t make such haste,’ says Francis, watching him, ‘you’ll come by them soon enough.’

The boy’s eyes glint at Francis over Fitzjames’s wrist before he lowers his lashes again.

‘Nothing from Liverpool?’ says Francis, that queer edge back in his voice. ‘Nothing from the Mersey? From that man you pulled from the river?’ He looks at the boy. ‘You’ll be racing upon that, soon enough, if you haven’t already.’

‘He’d have told us,’ says Fitzjames, ‘if he had.’

‘That he would,’ says Francis, and presses a hard kiss to Fitzjames’s ear. ‘No marks from that time, then, James?’

Fitzjames shakes his head.

‘And how many other times was it, then,’ says Francis, palm pressing and sliding, ‘how many times that you tried your damnedest to have yourself killed, and how many times were you nearly obliged?’

‘It wasn’t – ah, God – I wasn’t … seeking … that.’

‘No?’ says Francis. ‘You’re covered with them,’ he says to the boy, ‘every time I all but lost you, and how many of them before ever I even clapped eyes on you?’

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, reaching for him. Francis bends his head over Fitzjames’s chest again and worries the raised flesh of the scar with his teeth. He sits back and presses a thumb to the area, already tender with the attention of Francis’s teeth and tongue. ‘I could blot it out,’ he says, ‘but you won’t keep this mark as long. Not nearly as long.’

‘No,’ says Fitzjames, ‘but I shall demand it from you again, which I never did from that sniper or that Egyptian infantryman.’

‘Shall you?’ says Francis, thumb pressing into the underside of Fitzjames’s jaw. Fitzjames wraps his fingers around Francis’s wrist and urges him wordlessly to press harder.

‘You have me now,’ says Fitzjames.

‘Do I,’ says Francis. The boy nips at Fitzjames’s wrist, and the two of them shiver.

‘And what will you have, James?’ says Francis, breath hot on the side of his neck. ‘Will you measure the length of this pretty yard inside me, hmm?’

Fitzjames pushes into the firm pressure of Francis’s hand, presses an open-mouthed kiss to his soft hair. ‘Will you take me?’ he says. ‘I want,’ and he wets his lips at the memory of that fat flushing prick, ‘I want you in me.’

Fitzjames feels the scrape of Francis’s teeth as he grins, then has his chin grasped to face him. ‘You’re certain?’

Fitzjames nods, and Francis nods back. ‘Lie down,’ he says, and pushes Fitzjames back onto the bed. He goes without protest, half-sitting up on his elbows, the boy still attached to his hand.

‘Lie down,’ says Francis again, and Fitzjames obeys. Francis crouches over him, eyes running up and down him. His hands go to Fitzjames’s waist and he undoes his trousers with brisk workmanlike movements.

‘Lift,’ he says, and Fitzjames raises his hips to assist Francis. Francis hooks his thumbs beneath Fitzjames’s smallclothes so that they come off with his trousers, and Fitzjames closes his eyes as his prick springs free. Francis rolls his trousers past Fitzjames’s knees, then yanks them off his legs and tosses them over his shoulder.

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I shall need to wear those trousers again.’

Francis gives him a look and a shrug that ought, by rights, to make Fitzjames exceedingly nervous, except that he is sitting on his haunches and surveying Fitzjames’s prick with a glittering, predatory zeal.

He reaches out and runs the back of his fingers up the length of him. Fitzjames twitches beneath the touch, then shivers when Francis repeats the motion.

‘Just as I thought,’ says Francis quietly.

‘What – ah,’ says Fitzjames, ‘what did you think?’

Francis does not answer, the frown on his face bespeaking some weighty cogitation. He seems to have come to a conclusion when, with a nod and a grunt, he lifts one of Fitzjames’s legs and slings it over his shoulder. Fitzjames gasps as Francis mouths at the arch of his foot, thumb digging into the back of his knee. He bends his head and sucks at the soft flesh of Fitzjames’s inner thigh, kneading and moving steadily higher and higher, until he sinks his teeth into a tender place just beneath the hollow left by his hipbone.

Fitzjames bucks and cries out, hand flying to Francis’s hair. He feels the rumble of Francis’s chuckle against his skin and through the pads of his fingers. Francis eases off and licks in warm flat sweeps over the hurt, tongue crawling with agonising slowness until his breath is hot on Fitzjames’s hole.

‘Oh,’ says Fitzjames, and spreads his legs a little wider. He feels Francis smile against his skin and waits, breath held, for his touch.

Francis presses a kiss to his hole, a whisper of a thing, a chaste salute. Then he opens his mouth and begins in good earnest.

Fitzjames has, it must be confessed, devoted many an hour of pained reverie to the thought of Francis at feast. A man so steadily starved of his true deserts, Fitzjames reasons, must touch differently, kiss differently, eat differently, than a man who has always received the measure of his worth. Fitzjames would not know, himself being a man who has made off with fistfuls of rewards to which he was not strictly entitled, and who has made a habit of casting smoke and tinsel over his shoulder so that he can hasten away with his loot.

Fitzjames has a theory about Francis at play. Fitzjames has, in fact, several theories. And somewhere in this wealth of surmise he supposes must be one correct guess. Not that he is best placed to judge, with Francis’s tongue making long flat wet sweeps across his hole. Francis’s mouth is hot, and intent, and determined. Francis’s thin lips feel like a benediction and a threat all at once, and the occasional scrape of his teeth over Fitzjames’s sensitive skin has him heaving.

Francis makes careful work around Fitzjames’s hole before he feels the point of his tongue poking in. Fitzjames cries and quivers, and Francis’s arm comes up over his hips.

‘Sshhhh,’ he says, against Fitzjames’s skin, and Fitzjames tries to oblige, but Francis is slicing into him with his tongue, in increments no less voracious for being careful, and when Fitzjames quiets he can hear the rich, succulent sounds of a man allowed something both delicious and rare, and his tongue drags and swirls and flickers as though it cannot bear to leave Fitzjames’s skin, as though he has never had anything better, and Fitzjames –

‘Francis,’ he says, hips rolling beneath Francis’s staying arm, ‘Francis.’

‘Mmmmmm,’ says Francis, and lifts his head for one unbearable moment to rest it over Fitzjames’s chin. Fitzjames squints down at him, over his own heaving chest, and meets a very dark gaze.

‘Look at you,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames passes his tongue over his lips.

‘Could I bring you off like this?’ asks Francis, and Fitzjames considers, because Francis seems to be posing the question in earnest.

‘I don’t know,’ he says at length and with some difficulty, because he has never had to contend with the weight of this particular manner of Francis’s regard.

Francis grins, gap-toothed and joyous. ‘Shall we try?’ he says, in the tone of one who would happily surrender the remainder of his hours to the attempt.

Fitzjames hears a pleading ‘Francis’ and is not sure whether it is from his own throat or that of the boy. Francis flicks him a glance, and then looks back at Fitzjames before cupping his jaw and pressing a kiss to his lips.

He sits back and secures Fitzjames’s leg over his shoulder, stroking the pads of his fingers over the back of his knee and making Fitzjames squirm. Then he circles Fitzjames’s hole lightly with the tip of one finger, and Fitzjames sighs.

‘There now,’ says Francis quietly, and slides it in. Fitzjames’s eyes flutter shut and his spine rolls against the mattress. Francis pushes in a little deeper and Fitzjames breathes out. Francis probes and then withdraws, Fitzjames making a little noise of dissatisfaction as he does.

‘Sssshhh,’ says Francis, extracting his finger with a soft sound, ‘you need more than my spit, you know you do, lad.’ He calls over the boy, who scrambles over in a flurry of elbows and knees.

‘I’ll need to fetch the oil,’ he says gravely, ‘and I’ll need you to hold yourself open the while. Can you?’

Fitzjames and the boy let out the same high soft noise, and Francis grins. ‘Go on, then,’ he says to the boy. Fitzjames looks up and meets his eyes, dark and fierce. When he sinks his finger in, his hips rise up to meet him. He is unprepared, but unsurprised, to meet the boy’s other arm slamming down across his hips to pin him, and rolls and squirms merely to feel that strange familiar sinew slide against his own.

The boy bends forward, eyes moving restlessly between Fitzjames’s face and his own finger working Fitzjames open. Francis returns, wetting his lips with a quick movement as he sees them.

‘Give him another,’ he says, and the boy shivers. Fitzjames ripples as another long, slender finger nudges inside.

‘Man’s hands,’ says Francis, watching the boy’s wrist work, ‘how did the puppy come by them, hmm?’

The boy’s snort of affront turns into a gasp as Francis bites on the side of his neck. Fitzjames rolls his hips into the questing, inexpert touch.

‘My turn now,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames protests as the boy’s fingers withdraw. ‘Whisht,’ says Francis, ‘I’m coming to you, lamb.’

He sinks two rough square fingers in without preamble, and Fitzjames bites his lip at how easily they go. ‘The puppy has his uses,’ says Francis, and the boy sniffs but leans into the touch when Francis tugs at his hair.

Francis bends over the task, ears inclined towards Fitzjames as though he is steering by the hitches in his breathing or the timbre of his cries. Perhaps he is; as Fitzjames’s sighs at the first intrusion even out, he widens his fingers and Fitzjames whimpers softly at the stretch. The third finger has Fitzjames gasping. When Francis finds and plies the little place inside him, Fitzjames bucks against his thick forearm, meets a cocked eyebrow, and braces himself for the onslaught that he knows will come. Three fingers beat on the spot, a wheeling little jig, as Fitzjames thrashes and howls.

‘Look at you,’ says Francis quietly, ‘Christ, the state of you.’

Fitzjames passes his tongue over his lips and tastes salt. He is trembling on the mattress, his chest heaving as he snatches in all-too-scant air. His cock bobs against his belly, red and weeping.

‘I could keep you like this,’ says Francis, ‘how long before you spend?’

Fitzjames considers his words, mewling as Francis drives his fingers in deeper. ‘I – you said you’d take me.’

‘You said you wanted me to,’ says Francis, ‘and that was all we agreed.’

The boy opens his mouth to protest and Francis withdraws abruptly from Fitzjames’s clutching hole with a ripe filthy sound, slapping his fingers over the boy’s mouth to silence him. Immediately his mouth closes over them as he squirms closer to Francis.

Fitzjames moves swiftly, springing up and shoving Francis onto his back. He pushes his thumb beneath Francis’s chin so that he can look into his eyes, wide and dark. Then he shuffles down so that he is crouched over his prick, pulls him out of trousers and drawers with impatient movements, and swallows him down. Francis is weighty on his tongue, substantial and perfect, stretching him and making immediate demands that Fitzjames is clamouring to satisfy. He draws Francis into his mouth until he is nudging the back of his throat and then pulls nearly all the way off, admiring the sheen left by his spittle on his fat red shaft. He dives back again, pressing into the fingers curling into his hair and pushing back down, down, down until he feels his breath stop. A little, just a little, to have Francis force every other thing from him, to be inundated with Francis, mired in him whole and entire –

Francis’s fingers are tightening in Fitzjames’s hair as though to pull him off. Fitzjames’s hands slam down on Francis’s hips to hold him in place as he opens his throat.

‘James, James, Christ.’

Fitzjames hums, a garbled choked sound. He lets himself duck and bob, allows himself to drivel and slurp, digs his thumbs into Francis’s hips and relishes his tremor. He considers bringing Francis off in this manner, letting himself be flooded with him while he makes use of that solid thigh to frig himself, and then pulls off Francis with a luxuriant pop. Francis might choose inconvenient moments to split hairs about his obligations, but Fitzjames did not attain what little eminence he contrived by being lax about the debts that he owes and is owed.

He grasps Francis firmly by the root of his prick, hefting it with an avid hand. Francis reaches for him and he bats his hand aside.

‘Pay or play, Francis,’ he says, and sinks down onto him. He braces his palm on Francis’s chest and sucks in a breath; a thought too hasty, he thinks, the burn is licking up and down from his hole. He’ll feel this, and soon. His lips part at the thought: he will feel this, tomorrow he will feel this, will feel the bulkhead of Francis, his demand and his claim, will feel the imperative cling of his own walls as they impatiently, fervently make room for him.

Sea room, thinks Fitzjames, trying a slow roll of his hips and feeling his lips pull upwards as Francis’s hands slap down on his thighs, just as much as I permit.

‘James - ’

‘You said,’ says Fitzjames, lifting a little and dropping down only to hear Francis groan, ‘you said I was to instruct you.’

‘Ja – aysus, yes, Christ.’

With every movement he feels Francis stamp himself within him; inexorable, ineffaceable, some part of him secreted away forever. Fitzjames throws back his head in exultation and grinds down hard onto Francis, palm slapping onto a shirt damp with sweat.

Long, nervous fingers graze the head of his prick and Fitzjames’s eyes slam open. The boy has crept closer, breath hot on the side of Fitzjames’s face. His gaze is skittering from Francis down the length of Fitzjames’s body, and when it lights on his cock Fitzjames feels the impatient hunger like a brand.

Francis takes advantage of Fitzjames’s momentary distraction to tighten his hands on his hips and urge him into a dreamy measure, mannerly and decorous. The boy’s hand slides up and down on Fitzjames’s prick in time, slow and stately, his other hand resting between Fitzjames’s damp shoulderblades and his eyes trained darkly on Francis.

‘Like that,’ says Francis, eyes on the boy. The boy preens and hums, breath ruffling Fitzjames’s hair and hand working him lazily. Francis slides the hands holding Fitzjames’s hips down to his thighs, and Fitzjames’s muscles shift under his touch. Fitzjames clenches down once on Francis and gasps as his hands tighten painfully on his skin.

Fitzjames begins to move into a minuet, rising and dropping faster, the boy’s fingers pressing and stroking in time to the same unheard orchestra that animates them both.

‘James,’ says Francis, nails digging into the soft flesh of his thighs. Fitzjames hisses and falls forward, the boy curved against his side like ivy.

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, and rubs his cheek against the cambric of Francis’s shirt. He claws at his shirtfront, pulling it away enough that he can see the sandy-gold hair on his chest. He mouths at whatever skin he can reach, licking strips of salt off his neck, watching his breath on Francis’s parted lips. Francis drags him down for a kiss, hard and greedy, swallowing Fitzjames’s cries into his mouth.

Fitzjames gasps when he feels the tracing of a long finger down his back and then around his rim, where he and Francis are joined. Francis grunts into Fitzjames’s mouth, and Fitzjames lifts his head to stare over his shoulder.

The boy is looking at them, eyes wide open and very dark. His chin is up in a familiar attitude, and there are two precise spots of scarlet high on his cheeks.

‘Come here, lad,’ says Francis, and the boy shuffles over. ‘It’s a taste you’re wanting, puppy,’ says Francis, and pulls him down half-atop Fitzjames, driving Fitzjames down against Francis’s body and startling an ‘Ouph’ from him. The boy launches himself at Francis, licking up his chin and nudging at Francis’s mouth until Francis’s hand comes up to seize his hair and hold him in place to kiss. When Francis lifts the boy’s head off his own, he turns to bite at the corner of Fitzjames’s mouth. Fitzjames kisses him, sucking and biting on his bottom lip so that the boy’s mouth is a red smear on his thin face.

Francis’s hands move to Fitzjames’s arse and pull him down, hard. Fitzjames cries out, the sound smothered against Francis’s neck, and moves, pushing himself up enough that he has purchase on the mattress and can work himself up and down Francis’s yard.

Quicker, now, a choppy mazurka, Francis dragging him down with a single-minded purpose. Fitzjames leans forward on his hands briefly, and then emits a high thready gasp at the slow wet drag of the boy’s tongue across his hole, flattening to catch the snap of Francis’s prick into and out of Fitzjames. Francis and Fitzjames emit one shocked, hungry groan, and the boy continues to kiss and suckle.

‘God,’ says Francis, on a breath. He reaches for the boy and makes a swipe at his thigh. The boy raises his head with a frown and his jaw pushed out as to do battle.

‘James,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames and the boy both look at him. Francis grins and nods to the boy. ‘Bring him off.’

The boy looks at Fitzjames and grabs him in a swift clutching grip, rough and heavenly on Fitzjames’s weeping prick. He cleaves to his side and sets his teeth into his shoulder as his hand flies up and down. Ten tugs, fifteen, and Fitzjames is bucking and crying out, spilling in great ropes over the boy’s fist and Francis’s shirt. He clenches down on Francis as the crisis takes him, and Francis groans. Fitzjames feels his cock swell and jump, and moans into the boy’s hair at the warmth spreading inside him.

A few moments of quiet as their breathing slows, and Fitzjames feels Francis’s hand on his thigh. ‘Come here,’ he says. Sluggishly Fitzjames peels himself off Francis’s softening prick in a rush of seed and oil. Francis licks his lips at the sight and his hand tightens. Fitzjames crawls over to Francis and presses a kiss to his lips. Francis returns the kiss but pulls away, tugging Fitzjames to hunch over.

‘Farther,’ he says on a rasp and Fitzjames, puzzled, obliges until his knees bracket Francis’s face.

‘Like that,’ says Francis, and pulls him down, giving Fitzjames no time to respond before he buries his face between Fitzjames’s thighs.

Fitzjames lets out a gasping cry as that already-familiar tongue thrusts itself into his hole, pushing his own spend further in and then licking it out. Francis’s tongue is a hot sure questing thing, nimble and utterly tireless, seeking out every place inside Fitzjames’s walls. Fitzjames quivers, raw and sore and protesting and delighted.

‘Francis,’ he says, rocking down onto his tongue, ‘Francis, I can’t.’

Francis does not deign to vouchsafe him a reply, save to tighten his hands on Fitzjames’s thighs and pull him down anew.

Fitzjames’s prick throbs, fattening in joy and affront, and sobbing breaths pass his throat. ‘Francis, Francis, you must - ’

Francis hums against his hole, purses his lips and sucks. Fitzjames wails, thighs squeezing Francis’s head, hands slamming down against the wall. When Francis’s hands loose their hold on him, it is all he can do to not topple entirely on him, allowing himself instead to be urged gently backwards enough that he can flop forwards onto Francis’s chest, letting his knees unlock and his legs stretch in graceless, complicated motions.

They breathe together, Francis’s hand stroking his back. Then Fitzjames thinks of the boy and turns his head slowly to look for him.

The boy is kneeling where Fitzjames left him, frigging himself furiously.

‘You’ll have it off at that rate,’ says Francis’s voice, an amused scrape under Fitzjames’s cheek. The boy tosses his hair, cheeks flaming. Francis says ‘Christ, you’ll wear it down to flinders. Just – come here, lad, come here.’

The boy lifts his hand with obvious reluctance, but crawls over, his prick bobbing stiff and red.

‘We’ll need to attend to the puppy,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames hums. Francis pulls the boy to him for a kiss. He sighs and melts into his side, seeming to subside for a moment until Fitzjames observes the movement of his hips, grinding with a truly woeful attempt at stealth against the join of Francis’s belly and thigh.

Francis sighs and Fitzjames feels his hand worm down until it’s clamped firmly about the base of the boy’s prick. The boy yelps and stills. ‘You’ll wait,’ says Francis, ‘until James and I see fit to take care of you, and not before.’

It is difficult for the boy to toss his head while burrowed into Francis’s side, but he makes a valiant essay at it. A rather brooding silence ensues, punctuated only by the occasional shivering breath as the boy shifts and his prick brushes against Francis’s skin or Fitzjames’s hand.

At length, Francis says to Fitzjames ‘Shall we see to it, then?’ and Fitzjames pushes himself off Francis’s chest and reaches for the boy, who comes to him eagerly. Francis tucks his own prick back into his trousers and raises an eyebrow at the boy.

‘You can’t be trusted to handle yourself,’ he says, ‘not if you want to keep that pretty toy.’

‘It was the two of you,’ says the boy, ‘having at each other, I couldn’t - ’

‘Whisht,’ says Francis.

‘And you neither of you paid me the least mind, so what was I - ’

‘We’re paying you mind now,’ says Francis, and pushes the boy so that he is reclining against Fitzjames’s chest. ‘Hold him down, James,’ he says, and Fitzjames pins the boy’s arms. Francis turns and picks up the oil from the floor and pours it onto his fingers, sweeping an assessing look over the boy the while. He reaches between the boy’s legs and the boy arches up with a cry.

‘Be still now,’ says Francis, and the boy sucks in a great breath and slumps back against Fitzjames. But with every long, wet movement he jerks in his arms. Fitzjames hooks his chin on the boy’s shoulder and watches but can only make out the movement of Francis’s shoulders and the ripe soft sounds of his fingers plunging in and out of the boy’s hole. When the boy begins to thrash, Francis slaps his other hand on his thigh and says ‘I told you to be still.’

The boy presses a flaming cheek to Fitzjames’s shoulder and Fitzjames feels his fists clenching in the bedspread. Fitzjames presses a biting little kiss to his neck as a reward.

Then Francis seems to find a place in the boy that has his back arching and a startled, almost-indignant yell from his lips. ‘James,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames pulls the boy back, keeping an arm across his chest. The boy shudders and strains against the hold, and Fitzjames lets him before tightening his arm.

Francis keeps his eyes on the boy and presses in further. The boy throws his head back, almost knocking Fitzjames’s chin, and quivers. His cock is smearing his heaving belly, and there are succulent noises as he squirms down on the fingers working him open.

‘Look at you,’ says Francis. ‘You needn’t tug at yourself to have yourself off, I warrant you, lad.’

The boy blinks his eyes open. His lashes are wet. ‘I do,’ he says, ‘I do, I need - ’

He wails as Francis drives his fingers in again. His thighs jerk open and he strains against Fitzjames’s hold. Francis eases away and the boy slumps, panting. Francis takes one long leg and bends it about his own waist.

‘Perhaps you do,’ he says, ‘but not your own.’ He nods at Fitzjames, who raises a hand to that slender livid prick. When his fingers wrap around it he feels a calm sense of ownership, as of a familiar and well-loved instrument, without the fraught nervousness of being subject to its whims. The boy lets out a long trembling sigh at the first touch of Fitzjames’s hand. As Fitzjames continues he presses into every inch of Fitzjames that he can reach, melting back into his chest and baring his throat to Fitzjames’s tongue and teeth.

Francis is watching the movement of Fitzjames’s hand with narrow eyes. He raises his head to say ‘You’ve had some practice here.’

‘I’ve needed to use my hand for this purpose one time or another, yes,’ says Fitzjames, sliding his hand down the boy’s prick and letting the clear stuff dribbling from its head smooth the way.

‘Not that,’ says Francis, ‘playing to the gallery.’ He lifts his eyebrows. ‘How many hours in front of the glass, hmm?’

Fitzjames lowers his lashes and opens his mouth against the boy’s shoulder. He says, words pressed into the boy’s skin, ‘was that not what I was meant to do?’

‘It was,’ comes Francis’s voice, and Fitzjames risks a glance up through his lashes. Francis’s eyes are moving between the rise and fall of the boy’s glistening chest, his splayed-open thighs and Francis’s own fingers still buried in his hole, to Fitzjames’s hand moving slowly on his red gleaming prick. ‘It was, damn your eyes, it was.’ He fetches a long, rueful sigh.

Fitzjames smiles against the boy’s neck and rubs his thumb across the boy’s slit. The boy moans and twists in his arms. Fitzjames does it again. The boy jolts again. Fitzjames loosens the arm holding the boy. Lets his hand flatten on the boy’s chest and slide down his belly, skirting over his own hand on his cock, lower down so that he is cupping a hot bollock in one hand, then circling the boy’s rim and running delicately over Francis’s fingers, knotted together and squeezed by the boy’s hole.

The boy quivers, turning his face into Fitzjames’s neck and breathing hot wet puffs against his flesh. Fitzjames rubs gently at the tender rim, feeling Francis’s fingers twitch beneath the fine skin. Francis says on a rasp ‘Finish it, man.’

Fitzjames nods, moving his hand faster on the boy’s straining yard and keeping his eyes on those of Francis. It is not long before the boy is seizing and spending in great hot gouts over Fitzjames’s hand and his own belly and chest. Francis pets his thigh and watches him before he withdraws his fingers, though not without a final ripple inside the boy that makes him jerk and feebly whimper.

He unwraps the boy’s legs from around his waist and drops a quick kiss to one knee before getting off the bed. He walks away and returns with a cloth that he passes over the boy’s chest, cock and bollocks, grinning at the boy’s soft whine at the touch of the rag. He attends to Fitzjames too and then puts the cloth away. He looks down at his own extravagantly-bespattered shirtfront and the disreputable marks on his trousers with a rueful air.

‘If you had taken them off before,’ says Fitzjames, ‘you would not be in this pass, you know.’

Francis flicks him an eyebrow and says ‘And that’s the only reason you’re wanting me to take them off now, is it?’

Fitzjames shrugs and lies down, pulling the boy to him. ‘If you wish to sleep in those appalling trousers,’ he says, ‘that is quite your own affair.’

Francis dips his head but seems to see the force of Fitzjames’s argument. He unfastens his trousers and pulls them off with his drawers. Fitzjames and the boy watch the curve of his solid pink arse and his thick thighs as he stoops to retrieve them, and then at every inch of the wide chest and shoulders revealed to them and turning a deep pink under their gaze.

Francis looks away, sandy eyelashes glowing in the half-light and the tips of his ears turning red. He looks ready to scramble into bed and pull the covers up but Fitzjames forestalls him.

‘You have freckles on your shoulders,’ he says. Francis blushes darker, which only makes the freckles stand out more. ‘Like stars,’ says Fitzjames, running a finger over them. Stars in a twilit sky, he thinks.

‘James - ’

‘Ssssshhhhhh,’ says Fitzjames, and mouths at one of them, absorbing Francis’s shiver. The boy crawls over and lowers his dark head to lick Francis’s belly – wasted during their long days of privations and rot, filling out slowly now.

‘Christ,’ says Francis, hands tangling in their hair. The boy smiles against Francis’s skin, continuing to kiss and suck until Fitzjames tugs Francis onto the bunk, flanked by himself and the boy.

At some point, there is a discreet Jopsonian knock at the door and, upon opening, a tray outside with three plates. Fitzjames has entirely given up even trying to discern how Jopson divines the things he knows, so he accepts the plate with fortitude. The boy attacks his provender with an appetite Fitzjames remembers well, and that Francis observes with twitching lips.

They rest, for a time. Fitzjames wakes to find the boy in an already-familiar attitude, head tucked beneath his neck, legs tangled with his own. He runs his fingers through the boy’s hair and feels the boy press into the touch, eyes fluttering open against his neck.

‘Are you going to push me off?’ the boy asks, lips moving against Fitzjames’s collarbone. Fitzjames shivers a little, ticklish, and frowns.

‘Push you off?’

The boy raises his head to look at Fitzjames. ‘Last night. You pushed me off.’

Fitzjames pushes the hair out of the boy’s eyes. ‘Were you shamming sleep?’

The boy shakes his head. ‘No, but you woke me then.’

‘I was as gentle as I could be,’ says Fitzjames, and thinks to lower his voice. ‘I didn’t wish to wake you.’

‘Who could sleep after such handling?’

‘James,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I did not think you knew you were doing it.’

‘I didn’t know I was doing it.’

‘Well, then,’ says Fitzjames, ‘I did not wish to … press an unfair advantage. You were asleep, and you did not know to whom you were - ’

‘I thought,’ says the boy, ‘that you did not wish me to be there.’ He hunches a shoulder. ‘It makes no odds now, I suppose.’

Fitzjames’s hand tightens in the boy’s hair and he pulls him down. ‘No,’ he says against his lips, ‘but you are in error, nonetheless.’

The boy kisses him back, eager and hard, tongue wriggling into Fitzjames’s mouth. His hands come up to tug at Fitzjames’s hair and he squirms in his arms, prick nudging hot and insistent against Fitzjames’s own stirring yard.

‘Sssshhhh,’ says Fitzjames, as the boy snuffles and pants, ‘you’ll wake Francis.’

‘There’s not a man living could sleep through the din you two make,’ comes Francis’s voice. He raises himself up on one elbow and surveys them. The boy gropes for him and Francis grins at him. ‘You were doing famously without me,’ he says, ‘Go on, then.’

The boy scowls and wriggles so that he is lying all but widdershins across Fitzjames’s thighs (and his stiffening prick) with his arms across Francis’s neck. He attacks Francis’s mouth, open and wet and hungry, licking his chin in his haste. Francis chuckles and runs a hand down his back, coming to rest, broad and possessive, on his little arse. Fitzjames watches as his fingers slide between his cheeks, listens as the boy’s breathing stops, then shudders back again.

One thick finger circles slowly before sliding into the boy’s hole. The boy shivers, arms tightening about Francis.

‘So wet,’ says Francis, ‘ready, still?’

The boy nods, mouth opening against the join of Francis’s neck and shoulder. He sighs as Francis probes deeper, squirming into the touch.

‘James,’ says Francis, ‘I want you here.’ When Fitzjames shuffles closer, Francis says ‘Give the puppy your hand.’

Fitzjames lifts his hand and Francis examines it with narrow eyes. ‘You grew into them at some point,’ he says, with an intentness that has Fitzjames shivering. He picks up his hand and takes it to the boy’s mouth. ‘Open,’ he says, and the boy opens, sucking in Fitzjames’s fingers.

‘Like that,’ says Francis, ‘get him wet.’ The boy’s eyes shut and he goes to work on Fitzjames, hot and wet and seraphically content. He sighs around James’s fingers as Francis slides in and out of him, and lets go of Fitzjames with unctuous slowness after a not-inconsiderable interval.

Fitzjames trails his fingers down the boy’s back, watching the gleam of his spit on the little dimples at the base of his spine, before sliding into the boy’s hole. The boy’s back arches and he moans into Francis’s neck. Fitzjames’s fingers slide alongside Francis’s own square-tipped one, and he lets his head fall forward onto his shoulder.

‘Open your eyes, James,’ says Francis, and Fitzjames obeys, looking up into Francis’s eyes. ‘I want you to see.’

Fitzjames slants his eyes down to watch his own fingers pump slowly in and out of the boy’s hole, exactly out of step with that of Francis. Sliding alongside each other on the way in, probing and circling and widening, abrading obscenely on the way out. A clutching heat inside, the boy’s hips rocking down to meet them as he clings to Francis.

‘How is it?’ asks Francis. Fitzjames hums into his shoulder, crooking his fingers and stroking the boy’s walls until he finds the place that makes him buck and yelp. He can feel Francis’s lips against his forehead as he says ‘You should have him.’

The boy whimpers, or Fitzjames does. He drags his eyes up and raises his head enough to look at Francis, who says ‘You should know, James.’ He licks his lips, once, and continues ‘you should know what it is to be inside you. It’s - ’ and his light eyelashes flicker for a moment before he swallows and says, on an inward wondering rasp, ‘James, you should know.’

Fitzjames can feel the colour rising in his cheeks. He looks across at the boy, circling his hips and pushing down on their fingers, and swallows. He bends to kiss Francis. Nods and kisses him again.

‘What do you say, then?’ says Francis to the boy. He pulls his head up, digging his fingers roughly into his hair. The boy’s eyes flutter open and he looks at Francis: a somnambulist’s gaze, inward but intent. His eyes are dark and heavy.

‘The handsomest man in the Navy,’ says Francis, with a twist of his lips, ‘what say you?’

The boy’s lips part. He looks sidelong at Fitzjames and slides a hand around his neck, pulling him in for a kiss. He rolls his forehead against Fitzjames’s, looking up at Francis to say ‘And you too.’

It is not a question. Francis stares at them, rapt and arrested. He nods, the tip of his tongue sliding along his lower lip. ‘And I too.’

The boy nods, seemingly satisfied, before turning back to Fitzjames and biting his mouth. They kiss, long and thoroughly, the boy bearing down on Fitzjames in his vehemence. Francis twists his finger inside of him and he mewls into Fitzjames’s mouth, breaking off to pant into his neck.

‘Hands and knees,’ says Francis, ‘now.’ He slides his finger out and Fitzjames presses inside quickly once before doing the same. They dispose of the boy on the bed, his arse curved high and lovely.

Fitzjames places his hand on one cheek, stroking his thumb across the skin to watch the gooseflesh break out. ‘How would you have it, Francis?’

‘You first,’ says Francis immediately. ‘Open him up for me.’

Fitzjames wets his lips and nods. He bends to nose between the boy’s arse-cheeks, smiling at his shiver. He purses his lips over the boy’s hole and places a first kiss there. Then he opens his mouth and licks a broad stripe up the boy’s cleft, crawling with his tongue up and down and across the boy’s hole until it’s tender and hot and dripping, and the boy is wriggling and squirming. When he insinuates his tongue inside, the boy moans, back arching. Fitzjames grasps the boy’s thighs and plies him with quick flicks, with lavish wet caresses, with the stinging little bites perilously close to his hole that he himself likes best. He hums as the boy keens and pushes onto his face in eager, imperious movements. His hair falls across his brow in his exertions, tickling the boy’s tender flesh, and the boy squirms and gasps. Fitzjames feels a rough hand tucking the errant strand behind his ear, feels the brief impression of Francis’s mouth and a quick nip in salute.

When Fitzjames lifts his head, the boy’s skin underneath his tongue and teeth is soft and hot. He rests his chin in one of the dimples above his fundament and says ‘Oil.’

Francis fetches the bottle – its stores somewhat depleted – and pours some onto Fitzjames’s hand. Fitzjames places a quick bite to the boy’s arse before sitting up. Two fingers, without preamble. The boy sighs, back relaxing, as if an intolerable burden has been eased.

Fitzjames goes to work almost briskly before introducing a third finger. The boy purrs and rocks back into the touch. He jolts and howls when Fitzjames beats a quick sailor’s triplet on the little button inside him, shoulders bracing for Fitzjames to do it again. When Fitzjames obliges, he throws him a darkling glance over his shoulder even as he cries out.

Fitzjames withdraws his fingers, relishing the succulent sound they make as the boy’s hole clings to them in parting. He reaches for the oil but Francis forestalls him, grasping his prick with a slick hand and coating him thoroughly. Fitzjames drags Francis in for a kiss as his hand works, and their lips separate with a soft noise as Francis takes hold of the base of Fitzjames’s cock and eases the tip into the boy’s hole.

The boy quivers, a high sound escaping his lips. Fitzjames bites his lip and reaches out a hand – trembling, to his own mortification – to stroke his flank. ‘James, are you - ’

‘Yes,’ says the boy. ‘Yes, yes, why did you - ’

‘Give him more,’ says Francis, in his ear. Fitzjames nods and eases the rest in, eyes fluttering shut at the urgent clinging heat of the boy’s channel. He feels the pad of a rough square finger circle the boy’s rim, and the boy lets out a shuddering gasp, rising to a long high moan as the finger is inserted into his hole next to Fitzjames’s prick. Fitzjames hisses, letting his head fall back on Francis’s shoulder.

‘I told you,’ Francis says, the merest breath in his ear, ‘I wanted you to know.’ He strokes once, and both the boy and Fitzjames whimper, and then withdraws. Fitzjames turns his head, seeking out Francis blindly for the kiss that is pressed to his lips.

The boy is beginning to fidget. He says ‘You had better move.’

‘Had I indeed?’ says Fitzjames, treating the boy to a positively Franciscan arch of an eyebrow and with one hand tightening on the boy’s hip. He feels his fingers dig in, hears the boy’s gasp of affront and delight. He throws Fitzjames a scowl over his shoulder, which he might be more minded to respect if he were not also biting his lip and arching up into Fitzjames’s palm.

Still, he has a point. Fitzjames rocks his hips further in, and the boy groans. Faster, now, and the boy wriggles, moving back onto Fitzjames’s cock, so that when Fitzjames’s fingers are clamped on the boy’s hips and his own are moving like overheated pistons, the boy is rocking back eagerly into his grasp, mouth open in one long throaty cry.

‘Do it,’ says Francis, teeth grazing Fitzjames’s throat. ‘Come away now, James, I want to - ’ and he presses a broad thumb to Fitzjames’s hole. Fitzjames hisses and bucks back, just enough that the tip slips in.

‘Be done with it now,’ says Francis, hooking his thumb more firmly on Fitzjames’s rim, ‘come on.’

Fitzjames gropes for Francis and kisses him as he buries himself deep and spends, the boy clenching down upon him and keening as he does.

When he makes to withdraw, Francis says ‘Not too tidy, now,’ and Fitzjames shivers but complies, leaving a fat trail of his release shining slickly down the boy’s thighs.

Francis scoops it up with two fingers, surprising a tremor from the boy. He raises his hand to Fitzjames’s lips and presses their foreheads together as Fitzjames suckles, drawing the taste of himself off Francis’s skin. At length he takes his fingers out, Fitzjames allowing himself a last long voluptuous slide. Francis says ‘The puppy.’

Fitzjames crawls over to the boy and, with some pulling and pushing, disposes him as he likes him: sprawled almost entirely atop Fitzjames, cock trapped between their stomachs and allowing him to just see, over the high curve of the boy’s arse, Francis’s hand sliding over his own lovely prick. The boy rubs his cheek over Fitzjames’s chest in an impatient feline motion, and Fitzjames obeys the wordless demand, pushing his fingers into the boy’s hair.

Francis rubs his cock over the boy’s crease, hands gripping the boy’s arse-cheeks as he ruts between them. The boy quivers against Fitzjames’s chest and Fitzjames watches as he tries to squirm back and catch Francis on his rim, foiled by a firm hand palming his arse and, when the boy doesn’t settle, a sharp flick on what Fitzjames surmises is the boy’s hole, for he yelps and convulses.

‘Hold him down, James,’ says Francis’s voice, and Fitzjames takes the boy’s wrists and holds them firmly. The boy raises his head and stares into Fitzjames’s eyes, a fine tremor passing through him. He twitches and Fitzjames tightens his grip once, warningly, feeling the bones slide together beneath his fingers. The boy’s eyes darken and he licks his lips.

The heel of Francis’s palm presses down on the boy’s back. ‘Down,’ he says in a voice so low they feel rather than hear it. The boy flattens his shoulders and chest against Fitzjames until it is only the swell of his little arse lofted for Francis.

‘Francis,’ says Fitzjames, eyes not leaving the boy’s. Francis makes no reply but Fitzjames feels it in his own body when he pushes in. The boy gasps and starts, prick dragging along Fitzjames’s belly. Fitzjames stretches out a leg and runs his foot up the outside of one of Francis’s thighs until it rests on the curve of his fundament. Francis looks across at Fitzjames with dark eyes and says ‘You should keep your boots on the next time.’

Fitzjames takes his bottom lip between his teeth. ‘I wouldn’t wish to scratch them.’

Francis grasps his heel with one strong rough hand. ‘I’ll buy you others.’

Fitzjames lets his toes slide up and down that pale pink arse, insinuatingly near Francis’s cleft, and is unsurprised when Francis lets out an oath and tightens his grip.

‘I couldn’t do that if I were booted,’ says Fitzjames.

‘No,’ agrees Francis, and Fitzjames can feel the bunching beneath his skin as he rocks into the boy. A whimper and a shiver, then, gathering pitch as Francis picks up speed. By the time he is slamming into the boy, bollocks slapping against the boy’s slender thighs, the boy is leaking profusely, a pool on Fitzjames’s stomach. His mouth is open in a constant whine, and there are the marks of teeth and spittle on Fitzjames’s chest. Fitzjames holds both the boy’s wrists in one hand and spears his fingers into the boy’s hair with the other, staring over his dark head at Francis – Francis flushed down to his lovely belly, Francis with his hair sticking to his forehead, Francis with his blazing eyes, Francis animated by a fierce living joy that Fitzjames can delight in without the distraction of his own bodily importunings.

Fitzjames hooks his foot so that the heel is digging more firmly into the flesh of Francis’s arse. He says ‘Spend.’

His eyes meet those of Francis, radiating a sort of possessed gravity. Francis’s tongue peeps out and he rasps ‘James - ’

‘Spend,’ says Fitzjames, and lets his toe flirt with the soft skin around Francis’s hole. Francis bucks into the touch with a snarl and then snaps his hips forward so that the boy is driven forward with the force of it. The boy wails into Fitzjames’s skin as Francis spills, teeth bared and skin shining. He slumps forward onto the boy, and Fitzjames sighs in contentment at the weight of them.

After a minute, Francis sits up, and the boy whines as he withdraws. Fitzjames presses a kiss into his hair and runs his knuckles down his damp, trembling back. Francis says ‘James, come and see.’

There is a wondering, feverish quality to his voice. Fitzjames wriggles out from under the boy, nips him quickly at his moan as his neglected prick brushes Fitzjames’s thigh, and crawls over the boy’s prone form to look at Francis.

‘Here,’ says Francis. He has his thumbs on either side of the boy’s hole, loose and open and slick with spit and oil. Francis presses, gently, and – over the sound of the boy’s groan – their spend drips out, sluggish and slow, a teasing meander past the boy’s bollocks, curling down his thigh.

Their spend, thinks Fitzjames, his throat drying, his and Francis’s. He looks up and sees that Francis’s eyes are on him, dark and weighty. They hold each other’s gazes until Francis lowers his head and catches the trail on the tip of his tongue.

Fitzjames feels the boy shudder between his legs and passes an absent hand over his flanks. He is leaning forward, the better to observe Francis lick his way up the boy’s thigh and into his hole with narrow-eyed precision. The boy whimpers as Francis’s tongue swirls inside him, hungry and fierce and exact, a thorough and filthy kiss. The whimper turns into a long, gasping cry when Francis attaches his lips to his hole and sucks.

Francis lifts his head, his lips and chin glistening, and pulls Fitzjames to him. They kiss, Fitzjames sucking hard on Francis’s tongue, and when they part Francis says, ‘The puppy. Go feed him.’

Fitzjames crawls backwards with, he is certain, the very minimum of grace, lifting the boy’s head by the hair so that he can force his tongue into his mouth. He lets out a gurgling cry, swallowed into Fitzjames’s mouth, and clutches him, bony fingers digging hard into his hips.

And then he whimpers into Fitzjames’s mouth, and Fitzjames feels the heat of Francis’s body as he crowds up behind the boy. There is a wet, rich sound as Francis works his fingers into the boy’s hole, and Fitzjames pulls away from the boy’s lips to first press a kiss to Francis’s mouth, then move down the boy’s heaving chest and belly, liberally smeared with the clear stuff dribbling from the boy’s prick.

He crouches over it, and hears a soft laugh. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t take the opportunity before,’ says Francis. ‘Easy enough to frig yourself, and I’ll warrant you’ve put your fingers to use this way before - ’ he must twist inside the boy, for he arches and yowls, ‘but this, now...’

Francis is right, of course, and Fitzjames is not a man who has made a habit of shirking opportunities. He licks up the length of the boy – so well-understood, so strange – and the boy gasps. Fitzjames closes his lips over the tip and waits for the boy’s trembling to subside before going to work.

Curious, he thinks, that he must still learn how best to provide what pleases him. He remembers, yes, he remembers the touch he likes, the sort of pressure, where best he likes to be licked and where best to be sucked and how much he likes to have the slit attended to, but here, in practice, he must judge how best to ply tongue and hand and – with a great abundance of caution – teeth, the proportions of technique and zeal and spittle and suction, that long vein on the underside of the shaft, the skin at the base of the belly, the hot tight bollocks weighing on his tongue like a glorious filthy promise, the hectic beat of the blood under the skin, the hands in his hair, the other hand resting, rough and square, on his jaw –

Fitzjames looks up to see two pairs of eyes on him, rapt and hungry, Francis's fingers resting on his face. He tilts his head so that he can feel the boy’s prick pressing through the thin skin of his cheek. Francis groans in the boy’s ear and the boy pushes forward into Fitzjames’s mouth. Fitzjames’s hands come up, trailing up the boy’s thighs, but instead of the boy’s hips he seizes Francis’s.

‘Christ,’ says Francis, ‘James, God.’

Fitzjames hums and bobs, letting himself slaver and slurp and letting his fingernails dig into the meat of Francis’s buttocks. With a low rumble Francis goes to work. Fitzjames can feel the movement of his fingers in the boy’s high, wounded cries, his febrile rocking between the forces with which he is beset.

He feels the trembling of the boy’s thighs and the stammer of his hips before the boy digs his fingers into his scalp and pours down his throat, hot and immediate, with a long shriek. Fitzjames swallows him down, dropping his hands from Francis’s arse to the boy’s thighs with long strokes up and down while he finishes. He softens the hold of his jaw on the boy’s prick, preparatory to letting him slip out, when Francis presses his fingers in again. The boy jolts with a howl, a pleading noise.

‘There’s more in you,’ says Francis’s voice. ‘There’s more, and we’ll find it, now, won’t we?’

His fingers drive in and out with an inquisitive determination, the boy shaking and drenched and with his prick twitching limply in Fitzjames’s mouth. It is not until there is a real desperation to his cries that Fitzjames pulls away, lips soft on the boy’s tender yard, and rests his forehead against the imperative thrust of the boy’s hipbone.

Francis withdraws his fingers with one last obscene squelch, and holds his fingers out for Fitzjames to suckle on – an absent gesture, as though they were back on the ice and he were offering Fitzjames a drink of water from his flask. Fitzjames tongues Francis clean, and nips at the pads of his fingers in parting. They lower the boy onto the mattress and arrange themselves on either side.

Fitzjames curls up behind the boy, lifting his arm so that he can sling his own beneath it. He picks up the boy’s hand and frowns. The script on the boy’s hand is fading – or rather, lines seem to have been wiped entirely clean.

He shows the boy and Francis, who frowns. ‘You’re learning, then,’ he says, ‘at least in part, you’re learning what you were brought here to learn.’

‘I was to learn from you,’ says the boy.

‘From us,’ says Francis.

‘From you,’ says Fitzjames. He looks down into the boy’s eyes and then across at Francis. ‘He will know to attend to you now.’

Francis hesitates and takes the boy’s chin in his hands. ‘Attend to me on matters of the expedition,’ he says, and pauses, ‘but nowhere else.’

‘Francis - ’

‘James.’ Francis is still looking at the boy. ‘I will strike you,’ he says, ‘for being where I wanted you and did not want you, and for being lovely, damnably lovely, and for pricking me on the raw with true things.’

The boy is still, staring into Francis’s eyes as he continues ‘Sting me again, nettle me, chafe me. I know you will,’ and he smiles, a soft quick thing, ‘you cannot help it. But I could not bear it if you came to me with gentleness out of season.’

‘Francis - ’

‘I will love you, you see,’ says Francis, hand cupping the boy’s jaw, ‘when I have merited the knowing of it. I will love you quite to distraction. And I would not burden you with it now, but I am afraid I must.’

He raises his eyes to Fitzjames, who tugs him forward impatiently to kiss him, on the lips, the cheeks, the nose, eyelids, everywhere he can reach.

‘I did not know,’ he says.

‘You would not,’ says Francis, ‘you’ve a keen nose for admiration, James, but love’s a different matter.’

Fitzjames kisses him again, and then lifts the boy’s hand once to his lips.

The marks are now quite gone.

When they wake, there are only two of them in the bunk. There is James, long and bed-warmed, and there is Francis, but there is no sign of the boy.

Francis gets up to search his berth and look out into the cabin, but there is no sign of him. James has raised himself on his elbows with a frown on Francis’s return.

‘I can’t find him,’ says Francis. ‘James, we have to look for him, I don’t know - ’

James has pulled up his knees to his chest, his eyes a little distant. ‘He’s gone,’ he says.

‘Yes, I know that, I’m telling you we must - ’

‘No,’ says James, ‘he’s gone.’ He places his hand over his heart. ‘I know it. He is safe, he has what he needs, but he is gone.’

‘Oh.’ Francis sits down next to James. ‘You’re certain?’

James nods.

Francis puts a hand on his shoulder, suddenly unsure of its welcome. ‘Are you all right?’

James turns into the touch and Francis dares an arm about him, then to pull him closer. James burrows his head into the place where Francis’s shoulder meets his neck. Francis strokes his hair and presses a kiss into the tumble of dark hair obscuring his view of the man’s face. ‘James. Are you all right?’

One shoulder hunches up and there is a pause. ‘I don’t quite know.’

‘You will miss him,’ says Francis, brushing the hair behind James’s ear.

James nods against Francis’s shoulder. ‘It is right that he took what he needed, and I suppose he could not have stayed forever, but yes, I confess I shall.’

‘You need not confess to that,’ says Francis, ‘no blame attaches to you for feeling it.’

James lifts his head to look searchingly at Francis. ‘Shall you? Miss him?’

‘Yes,’ says Francis. That long-limbed, giddy, heedless minx with his pets and his eyelashes and his pitiable attempts at playing the man of the world. James’s pets, James’s hair, James’s mettle and hunger and intent dark gaze. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘how could I not?’

James lowers his head to Francis’s shoulder again and there is a silence. At length he says ‘If we can save the expedition - ’

‘It would be sufficient for me,’ says Francis, ‘if we deterred him from joining up.’

James looks at him, and a thousand thoughts seem to be racing behind his eyes before he says, with a deplorable attempt at archness: ‘And we would never have met, then.’

‘We would have, I think,’ says Francis, but his soul hurts to think that James is right. And then he thinks of the hair twined through his fingers and the wounds that have begun to close again and the nacreous red cloud lifting over James’s dark eye and he says ‘Let the boy keep whole.’ Keep him whole, he thinks, hale and untroubled and wanton. So he thinks, but his arms tighten around James and he buries his nose in his hair.

‘Well,’ says James after a pause, shifting in Francis’s arms, ‘you must content yourself with me.’ The archness is back, but strained. ‘Pitted and unwhole and greying - ’

‘Greying?’ Francis squints down at the cloud of dark hair. ‘Gr – James, is this about that grey hair?’

‘Two grey hairs,’ says James, and there is no mistaking the tone now. ‘You were so good as to draw my attention to the fact.’

‘Two - ,’ and Francis swallows a grin with enough effort that he feels his ribs ache. ‘Oh, aye, aye, two grey hairs. Time leaves its marks, you know, James.’

James sniffs, and Francis cannot forbear the grin now. ‘Like making love to a corpse, honestly - ’

‘Very well,’ says James with decision, ‘I am leaving.’

He launches himself off Francis’s chest, but Francis grabs him back and pushes him down. They tussle, producing great heat but no flame, and Francis has James easily pinned, face turned away and jaw set.

‘You’re going nowhere,’ says Francis. Not now I somehow have you here. ‘I’ll burn your clothes if I have to.’ Like a selkie’s skin, he thinks, that’s how they keep them, isn’t it?

He thumbs at the crease running down the side of James’s mouth and says ‘You have lines coming on the side of your mouth.’ James’s eyes close and Francis says ‘I like them.’ Humour, now. A rueful capacity for self-mockery. The hard-won steadiness around the eyes, too, the once-sharp gaze that now sees deeper.

James says ‘You said he was beautiful.’

‘And so you were,’ says Francis, ‘You’ve never wanted for beauty, and you never will. And dear Christ, how I hated you for it.’ And then I forgave you for it, he thinks, and then I loved you, and dear God that was reward enough. I never looked to have you – what man could dream so large? – leave alone to have two of you.

When James says nothing, Francis goes on ‘Is it such a tragedy to age, then? Such a tragedy to live?’

There is a long silence while James seems to consider. At length he says ‘Live as what?’

Francis waits and says nothing. James goes on ‘Sagging? Dwindling? No longer able to handle a gun or a Fox - ’

‘ – You barely can handle the Fox anyway, James - ’

He absorbs the aggrieved swat he gets in response and James continues ‘Retire to the country then? Staid and sedate and sedentary? A Justice of the Peace? A magistrate?’

Francis laughs. ‘A magistrate in a wig and a gown.’

‘Glasses, for my ruined sight - ’

‘ - But only once you’d found a pair you were persuaded became you well enough.’

James casts his eyes heavenwards and Francis continues ‘You’d have a fireside.’ Firelight snared in James’s hair and turning his eyes the colour of Connemara marble, James’s long fingers moving through the air as he makes a point.

‘A silver cane to thump on the floor as you tell your interminable stories - ’ James contrives to get a leg out far enough beneath Francis to jostle him in his ribs.

‘Gout,’ says James suddenly, freighting the word with far more than it should bear.

‘Gout,’ says Francis, ‘because of all the rich sauces you know you cannot digest but that you insist on having simply because we can have eggs and butter and cream now. And the best cuts of venison because the grocer’s wife has an eye on the pretty Naval captain.’

‘Rheumatism,’ says James.

‘Frostbite,’ counters Francis.

‘Forgetting,’ says James slowly, ‘diminishing.’

‘You’ll not diminish,’ says Francis, ‘not with all those sauces. I’ll not permit it.’ James’s skin, hanging off bone, James’s ribs piercing his flesh with every rattling breath he took.

‘Forgetting, then.’

‘I promise you, lad, I’d remember how to bring you off, if I remembered naught else.’

James is looking at him, his eyes very bright. He says, slowly ‘And you would be there.’ There is a question there, somewhere, accompanied by a wavering hopeful smile. ‘Despite my distempers.’

‘All of them,’ says Francis, ‘if you will have me and my ill conditions.’

The knee jostles him in the ribs again, but there is a hand in his now and James’s eyes are shining. ‘Who else so keenly enjoys the tale about the guano deposits?’

Francis groans and thumps his head down on James’s chest. ‘Who else indeed.’ And then he makes his way down James’s body and tries to show him, with fingers and lips and tongue and teeth, that living has its privileges.

[1] He does not use precisely these words.

Back

[2] He uses precisely these words.

Back

[3] And, Christ above, Fitzjames has asked for help before and not disdained to do so. But he asked to be helped out of an ignominious life, not into it.

Back

[4] He thinks he learned.

Back

[5] Although Fitzjames’s heart smarts queerly at Francis making a May-game of the boy, well enough though he might deserve it.

Back

[6] A blush high on the boy’s cheeks suggests he remembers their tutor as well.

Back

[7] A leer, quite frankly, on this man as well.

Back

[8] If he can ever find it, that is.

Back